Sampath Sowmynarayan,  President Global Enterprise - Verizon Business Group

The way we work has been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has made it clear that a remote working model is not a “nice to have” for global businesses, but a prerequisite. The new world that will take shape as we work through the pandemic and beyond the fourth wave of remote working will be determined by organizations deploying remote working at scale and extending remote working possibilities with next-generation technologies driving competitive advantage.

Reshaping the technology transformation agenda:
1.  Define transformation vision and goals: The COVID-19 pandemic’s dramatic drive toward a remote working model offers us many lessons. As we move into the fourth wave of remote working, CIOs need to think about how their IT infrastructure performed during the crisis and really note down their key learnings.

2.  Focus on future-readying your people building blocks, i.e., workforce and talent: This second step is about ensuring that the company has the right skills available to deliver on transformation vision.

3.  Build scalable and adaptable application, IT infrastructure, and data and digital platforms (DDP): The most important part of future-readying the business is to ensure that the organization has a modular, flexible IT architecture, which can adapt to challenges the future brings.

4.  Design cybersecurity from the beginning: Designing cyber security into a transformation from the very start helps control development and operation costs, reduce time to implementation and generate revenue earlier.

Technical building blocks— transformation imperatives 
1.  A scalable network - Organizations of every shape and size require a network that can support the dynamic and on-demand needs of their users and applications—for example, more bandwidth to support seasonal sales requirements, more VPN connections or cloud access to support work-from- home requirements. Traditionally, companies have purchased different devices to deliver networking functionality—routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, etc. With SDN, the network is now software based, and these functions are accomplished virtually.

2.  Cloud ready applications - In this building block, again, the first must-do is creating an inventory of which applications a business already have, and which are already mission-ready to be moved to the cloud. And this is an inventory check that should actually be repeated frequently.

3.  Strong and secure mobile connectivity - The must-dos of this third building block are all about delivering reliable and secure connectivity. The quality of the physical connection cannot be overlooked here, so organizations should consider multiple options to get the right performance.

4.  End-to-end monitoring of performance - The overall objective is to curate an accurate data set so the business can understand how it might re- instrument different parts of the network, incorporating predictive analysis to help predict and prevent anomalies or outages, and automating actions, whether for users, transactions or applications. 

5.  Zero-trust security - The first must- do in this building block is to identify those business-critical applications and data feeds that are the organization’s most critical assets (“crown jewels”)  without which the business could not operate. These could be virtual or data assets or physical assets such as manufacturing or energy production and transmission equipment.