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Ifthere’sone positive to come out of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s that many businesses have acceleratedtheir digital transformation programmes.
Many have enabled their staff to‘work anywhere’and arenowlooking at optimising theremote working experience. Strengthening security and offering customers more online, self-service options (in the absence of in-person services)have also been high on the agenda.
In times ofgreat activity,IT leaders and their teamsfacemore questions, more challenges. They also have more of an appetite to explore the latest technologies andsolutions to their problems.
It, therefore,seemslike the perfect time for us to beformalisingour Office of the CTO (OCTO).OurOCTOenablesus to be a strategic partner to our customers, providingthem witha space to articulate their current (and future) business needs, and explore how we might add business value.
It’sless about talking productsandmore about helping customers with everything from their immediate questions to their future ambitions. Ultimately,we want to see them progress their digital transformationprogrammesin the right way,so that we both have success stories to talk about!
Engineers and experts from across Node4 are also excited about the possibilities of the OCTO. It willgive theman even greater understanding of customers, as well as in-depth feedback on Node4’s solutions, which will help improve services and product development.
OurOCTO will be more thanjustregular meetingsbetweenNode4 customers and experts.TheOCTOteam will be engaging with our Customer Champions andgetting involved inconversationswithinour customer community, The Gateway. We'll also be contributing to theNode4 blog (which you cansubscriber to here), as well as video content and other forms of thought leadership - all based on what we're discussing and what the market wants to here.
IT trends we'll be exploring
Based on initial conversations with customers,here are some of the themes we’llbediscussing in the coming months:
The rise of ‘work anywhere’
Over the past year, we've seen businesses move to home-working anddeployingnew collaboration solutions overnight. Now thatremoteworkingis the norm, many are puttingsecurityat the top of the agenda to support their‘work anywhere’strategy.
Optimisedcloud
Hybridcloudis the current buzzword. After the initial rush for public cloud services, many businessesnowrealisethat some workloadsare perfectly suited to public cloud,whileothersaren’t.
The desire now is to run workloads in the optimal place, whether that is on-premises, with a ServicesProvider (whetherco-located, private/dedicated cloud,or even IaaS) or in one of the public clouds such asAzure, AWS or GCP.
An ‘optimal place’ is somewhere that organisationscan control spend,introduce secure and fast connectivity between multiple locations,and ensure business data is safe and well protected.
Modern workplace toolsand applications
Working remotely has changed how we consume apps and data. For this reason,we’reseeinganappetite for modern workplace tools such asMicrosoft 365continue to grow.There’sa drive towards applications and data residing back with endpoints, along with a focus on data protection andmobile/endpoint management.
Containers, too, are gaining momentum. As more businesses changehowthey work and use cloud-ready apps, this trend will continue to grow. Vendors such as VMWare andNetappare drivingKubernetes,in particular,andadding functionality to their offerings to simplify customer usage.
Strengthening cyber security
Each day, we seeanother cyber security attack in the headlines.It’snot surprising that businesses’ concerns aregrowing andthat,when they’re considering new services, they’re lookingatsecurity as much as functionality.
BackupandDisaster Recoverystrategies have also become hot topics, as businesses strive to protect themselves against ransomware attacksandachieve‘a minutes and hours’ recovery SLAforalmost every eventuality.
The shift to self-service
More and moreorganisationsarelooking to provideonline, self-service options to their customers, and theyexpect the same kinds ofservices from their vendors and partners.90% of IT service customers now list self-service as one of their top requirements when selecting providers, andpublic cloud has only driven this behaviour with everything being immediate and self-fulfilled.
There are,of course,security risks associated with businesses having everything at their fingertips. Somanyare looking for that balance ofbeing able to self-serve, but with the protectionand best practice advice of a managed services provider.
Of course, these are just a few of the headline trendswe’rethinking about withinthe OCTO. Watch this spaceover the coming monthsasour OCTO members delve deeper into these topics(and others) onour blog.
Ifyou’rea Node4 customerandyou’re keen to get involved inOCTO discussion,we’d love to hear from you -please get in touch.
