The number of profit warnings issued by UK tech firms has almost tripled in the past year, highlighting the ongoing economic issues across the industry.

Outside of technology, UK-listed companies also registered the largest number of profit warnings since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over one-in-five (22%) profit warnings were issued by companies in the technology, media and telecoms (TMT) sector - a total of 16, up from six in Q1 2022.

In total, UK-listed firms sent out 75 profit warnings between January and March 2023, up from 72 across the same period in 2022. 

Results shared in EY Parthenon’s newest tech profit warnings report showed the start of the year was the worst period of profit warnings since the pandemic, with companies having issued an unprecedented 305 in Q1 2020.

Over one-third (35%) of profit warnings highlighted canceled or delayed contracts - a sign of continued uncertainty across the industry as demand remains unstable.

The report also found that 46% of the companies that issued a profit warning across the period had done so in the previous 12 months.

“Significant disruption and uncertainty, particularly in consumer-facing markets, is having a knock-on effect on the TMT sector as businesses reevaluate their cost bases and delay purchasing decisions,” said Will Fisher, UK strategy and transactions TMT leader at EY.

“The result is short-term revenue growth challenges for TMT companies, many of which are also trying to prioritize profitability and cash flow as they face a tighter and more expensive lending environment.  

“To navigate these revenue growth and profitability challenges, TMT companies need to look at how they can manage costs and pricing, reduce supply chain vulnerabilities, focus on talent retention and recruitment, and continue to adapt to their customers’ needs – including those on sustainability.”

98 companies have issued two or more profit warnings since the start of 2022. 31 have issued three, with nine of these having since delisted or been sold.

EY noted that at 29%, this percentage of delisting represents a higher-than-normal rate of companies dropping out of the market. 

One in five firms might be expected to delist after their third warning in normal market conditions.

The findings were published as firms continue to struggle with the global economic climate. 2023 has already seen a huge wave of big tech layoffs, with Amazon and Salesforce having axed 26,000 jobs in January alone.

Meta is set to continue to fire technical teams as it aims for another 10,000 redundancies after firing 11,000 staff in November.

Google will no longer require vaccinations as a condition of employment for US workers, according to a new company memo.

First announced in November 2021, the heavily-opposed policy required staff members to report their vaccination status or apply for a medical or religious exemption by 18 January 2022 or be placed on paid leave for 30 days and eventually have their contracts terminated.

However, Google has now decided to scrap the vaccination condition, meaning that unvaccinated employees will be able to keep their jobs as well as enter the offices – although some conditions will remain.

These include mandatory negative COVID-19 tests and face masks, according to an internal memo sent by Google Real Estate and Workplace Services vice president David Radcliffe, as seen by CNBC.

In the email to Google’s San Francisco Bay Area staff, Radcliffe said that the offices are expected to “feel pretty similar to what it was like pre-Covid”, with employees being able to once again benefit from the campus’ massage and shuttle services, as well as gym walk-ins.

Vaccinated employees will be allowed to enter offices without being required to wear a mask, and social distancing rules will also be relaxed, as long as they’re in line with local state legislation. Office attendance will continue to be optional, with employees being notified 30 days in advance of being required to return to working from campus.

“We’re designing and piloting options to support new ways of working together and we’ll gather insights, data and feedback to help us learn as we go,” Radcliffe added.

Despite Radcliffe’s statements, The New York Times found that the policy requiring a full vaccination status in order to be allowed entry to Google’s offices is reportedly still in place.

Google wasn’t immediately available to comment on the reports.

The tech giant isn’t the only tech company that imposed vaccination policies – in January, Meta introduced a mandate requiring all employees to have had a COVID-19 booster jab before returning to its US offices, which are scheduled to reopen on 28 March.

Microsoft, on the other hand, hasn't specified whether employees will need to be vaccinated in order to return to the office. Its headquarters in Washington State are scheduled to fully reopen on 28 February.

Cyber criminals are using offering fake vaccine passports as lures in phishing email scams, according to security researchers at Fortinet.

“Successfully enticing the general population to open a malicious email attachment with the promise of receiving an illegal product may be a first. It reflects how polarizing this issue is and why cyber criminals think that they can successfully exploit it,” Fortinet said.

The researchers discovered an email with an advertisement for a fake COVID vaccine passport that requests Bitcoin payment. The Bitcoin address had zero transactions, which means no one seems to have yet fallen for this scam. The researchers were also unsure if the criminals behind the email would ever send a fake vaccine passport, or if it was a regular phishing exercise or even both.

“What's clear is that scammers ask the target for personally identifiable information (PII) along with USD 149.95 worth of Bitcoin for a potentially double windfall,” said researchers.

Other attempts appeared more professional using the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) address to appear legitimate.

“The link in this email did not lead to any official document but instead redirected the user to a legitimate server that had been compromised. While the link has been taken down, indicators suggest that this compromised server was used in a phishing attempt,” said researchers.

Researchers also found markets on the dark web offering fake vaccine passports, ranging from blank vaccine cards to verifiable passports that can be checked against legitimate vaccine databases worldwide. They found a single blank vaccination card for $5, but researchers again added there was no guarantee a purchaser would ever receive these documents after paying.

Researchers said the demand for fake vaccine passports seems to be growing due to the large population of people who resist taking or are unable to take the vaccine but want to avoid restrictions.

“Without missing a beat, email scammers and black-market criminals have acted on this demand,” said researchers. “Because these criminals use phishing techniques to socially engineer and lure victims into following steps laid out by the attacker, it is vital to address these challenges.”

Researchers recommended organizations conduct ongoing training designed to educate and inform personnel about the latest phishing/spear-phishing techniques and how to spot and respond to them.

Oracle and the University of Oxford have developed a global pathogen analysis system (GPAS) to help governments and medical communities cope with new COVID-19 strains.

Powered by Oxford's scalable pathogen pipeline platform (SP3), Oracle APEX, and Oracle cloud infrastructure (OCI), GPAS allows standardized genome data analysis and comparison for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Early adopters of the system include the University of Montreal Hospital Centre Research Centre, the Institute of Public Health Research of Chile, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, and more.

GPAS, which is available as a free resource, has also been integrated into Public Health England's New Variant Assessment Platform.

Researchers and governments are reportedly using the system to stream pathogen data in an effort to track new COVID-19 variants. With users’ consent, test results can be made accessible to participating labs worldwide.

The cloud-based system can also integrate with existing sequencing infrastructures and data repositories to enable seamless tracking of pathogens. GPAS also features built-in computational infrastructure, relieving labs of building and operating their own.

According to reports, the upcoming version of GPAS will include enhanced scalability and data-sharing functionalities.

"GPAS is the first industry standards-based service anywhere in the world, offering a standardized sequence data analysis service for users on the cloud," said Derrick Crook, professor of microbiology at the University of Oxford's Nuffield Department of Medicine.

Crook added, "Users will be able to access, upload and process their sequence data fully under their sovereign control and receive back fully analyzed data in as little as 20 minutes of successful upload. If they select to share data, they will contribute to electronic dashboard visualizations of global data revealing the daily changes in the way the pandemic is progressing and how the virus is changing. This will enable continuous assessment of the pandemic and help guide national and global interventions to curb the impact of the virus."

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘Digital stagnation in a post-COVID world’. To listen to the full episode, click here. We apologise for any errors.

Adam Shepherd

Hi, I'm Adam Shepherd.

Jane McCallion

And I'm Jane McCallion.

Adam

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast where today, we're asking whether the tech revolution brought about by COVID-19 could stall businesses technological progress in the long run.

Jane

It's no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic sparked something of a digital revolution. We've spoken about it multiple times before on the podcast and have published a number of articles about it on the site. company's condensed five or 10 year digital transformation projects into just 12 months, while others went one step beyond typically by implementing permanent work from home policies, and in some cases, abandoning physical offices for good.

Adam

Overall, this has been seen as broadly speaking, a good thing. Digital transformation is something companies of all shapes, sizes and ages need to adopt. But with what were long term projects now completed, could we be on the brink of a new period of digital inertia?

Jane

So Adam, digital transformation has been the talk the focus of the IT industry, if you like, for years and years. And typically it's been quite a long term project that people have had planned, but COVID-19 has meant that all of those plans and ideas went from being, you know, kind of like maybe five years, maybe 10 years to just like now. And it's all happening right now. And I think there's a bit of a dichotomy here that some companies might see this as a springboard. But I think there's a real risk that the other companies are going to kind of go, Well, that's it, we've done our digital transformation. That was good. It didn't cost us as much time or money as we thought. So yeah, brilliant, kind of let's, let's have a rest. And yeah, that's, that's what it is. Is that something that you think is a risk as well?

Adam

Yeah, I think that's absolutely a risk, particularly with, as you say, how, how expensive and how demanding digital transformation is, as well. You know, the, the pandemic wasn't easy on any organisation really, and setting up the kind of infrastructure that was needed to cope with remote working and with lockdown in terms of things like collaboration platforms, cloud file sharing, all of that kind of stuff. That's a big ask for an IT team to set up. And it's a big ask, you know, candidly, for a board to justify in terms of expenditure and cost as you as you said, a lot of these projects were things that were planned out and scheduled and budgeted for across multiple years. So the the concept of asking the board off the back of, you know, what is really quite a major time and financial investment, to authorise another set of big digital transformation initiatives, that's going to be a hard sell for a lot of IT departments, I think, and I think a lot of boards are going to go no, well, we, you know, we don't need to do anymore, we're as digitally transformed as we need to be now.

Jane

Yeah. And I think it probably depends on where kind of in their digital transformation journey organisations were For us, I think, as we've spoken about before, Dennis Publishing, home of IT Pro, already had a lot of that kind of SaaS-type stuff going on, a lot of collaboration stuff. But there will be plenty of other organisations who had absolutely none of it, and will have had to have made a massive outlay in 2020, in order to just get the basics in place. And I think for those companies in particular, the idea of then continuing to spend more on this is going to be a difficult pill to swallow. I mean, do they need to, can they just take a break?

Adam

Well, it depends on what they what they want to do. You know, I mean, there are many organisations who had historically been resisting rolling out things like Slack and Teams and SaaS tools in general, because they didn't really see the need for it. And while there are a lot of great things that can be achieved with digital transformation, you know, many of which we've spoken about already on on the podcast, and I'm sure we'll speak about a great deal more use cases over the course of this episode. But you don't need to do any of those things. If you're content as a business, to just trundle along the way you've always done things and just trust essentially that you're not going to have a competitor coming in using digital transformation to eat your lunch. If you're willing to take that business risk, then no, honestly, you don't always need to keep reinventing yourself and keep pursuing these kind of digital transformation goals.

Jane

Yeah, and I think a lot of the sell of digital transformation, and I really mean the kind of marketing side of it, has been a sort of perpetual revolution type thing. And that might not be so appealing for organisations, depending on kind of the kind of organisation that they are, if they are up for continual improvement, continual tweaking around the edges, because yeah, it doesn't have to be a big bang, it can just be like, okay, well, let's make incremental improvement over here, let's make an incremental improvement over there. And if they're up for that, then good, if they're not, then you it's going to be not in their nature really to do any more digital transformation unless they really, really need to. And I also feel a bit like, for some organisations, I typically think kind of small organisations for whom this will have been a much bigger hit, than perhaps some larger ones. That actually, this whole process may have been quite intimidating. Actually, you know, if you've been through this kind of thing, you might want to kind of carry on down that road, or at least, leave it for a bit before you look at, like you say, kind of moving your applications to the cloud or deciding to offload everything to public cloud or, or whatever it is you're going to do next.

Adam

It's also worth bearing in mind that while we talk about, you know, the establishment of all these SaaS tools is something that's, that's done now, that companies have been through, they kind of haven't really finished. Yeah, the functionality might have been stood up. But for these systems to be sustainable and effective over the long term, there's a lot of tweaking, and, you know, monitoring and maintenance and adoption work that needs to be done to make sure that they can bet in in a sustainable way. They're not done like the rollout isn't done by any manner of means just yet.

Jane

Maybe uncovering that will be the thing that gives any kind of more reluctant organisations, a bit of a shove in the direction of actually, no, this is a continuing process, versus something that has a finite end.

Adam

Ultimately, it depends what outcome businesses want their IT departments to deliver, you know, if all they want is kind of a little bit of additional productivity, then those kinds of SaaS collaboration tools will probably more or less do the job. If they want more kind of flexibility across the board, there's a number of line of business tools that can be bought in; cloud accounting software, for example. If they want to actually expand into newer business models, that's when you need to start looking at kind of more serious initiatives that are going to take multiple years and significant amounts of investment in terms of things like standing up new applications, modernising existing ones, deploying more data driven thinking into how you bring your products to market.

Jane

Yeah, and I think perhaps this is very much dependent on the kind of organisation we're talking about. For example, if you are a hairdresser, then you might have an app and a website booking system and that kind of thing, maybe some kind of integrated payment system. But that kind of might need to be as far as you need to go, you're not going to necessarily need to think about how like, right, okay, how do you transform it so that, you know, kind of whatever is blah? You know, that might be for now at least as far as far as you need to go, which is also fine, just the acknowledgement that, okay, well, we have everything we need now. Let's keep an eye on things. Let's see if we can maybe update our app further down the line to make it more user friendly or whatever, versus something that a more tech focused, perhaps larger organisation might want to do around that you say, kind of standing up apps or you're adopting more and more and more cloud services that do more and more things that if you are a smaller business, you just might not need, you just might not need that functionality. Not everybody needs Salesforce - sorry Salesforce. Not everybody needs Workday. So you know, if you've got a relatively small team, you might not need that stuff.

Jane

So I think we really need to talk about the other side of this when we're thinking about digital transformation. So so much of what's been highlighted by by us in the past and indeed in the present, and more widely is the whole working from home revolution that so many people are doing it. A lot of businesses who may have been reluctant have gone actually, you know what this is kind of great. And this has been a core part of why get all these solutions were implemented in the first place, why there has been such an acceleration in digital transformation. The idea that that is the accelerator is kind of predicated on the idea that we're not going to go back to the office, or most people won't, or it will just be a tiny bit. But there is a real pull in some companies. And most recently, the government really, really, really want people back in the office, like, they really want people in the office. And if you have that kind of pull back to physical premises, is by and large, successful, back to everybody being in nine to five, whatever, then that's going to significantly undermine this particular driver of digital transformation, the fact that you have people who are, or a large number of people who are working remotely, this distributed workforce, if you like, and that a lot of collaboration tools, a lot of new video conferencing tools, all of that kind of thing, is there to facilitate that. So could we even see a step backwards, do you think?

Adam

No.

Jane

Well, that's it for the IT Pro Podcast this week!

Adam

Well, there's a bit of a misconception that collaboration software, and, you know, Slack, and Teams, and all of those kind of platforms are built for facilitating remote working, which is not entirely true. They are great for remote working, and for enabling remote workers to connect with their fellow colleagues. But they're also really good for just, you know, in office collaboration, you know, because while talking over the desk, for example, is great and an excellent way to collaborate and whatnot, the ability to rapidly communicate with even other other people within the same office, in different departments to share files and folders, to ping over links, to collaboratively work on documents, for example, all of that stuff works equally well, whether you're based on the next desk over or in another country. And it's it's that level of agility, that digital transformation is trying to get to, it's trying to lift organisations out of the quagmire of having to collaborate via long rambling email threads.

Jane

Yeah, and that's a very good point, you know, you and I, if and when we eventually go back to Dennis Towers, can easily speak to each other across the desk. But if I want to go and speak to somebody in sales, it's like, oh, are they on floor two? Are they on floor five? I can't remember; whereabouts do they sit on these floors? Have they decided that actually, they're going to sit in a different part of the company today? And so it's a lot easier to just message them than to start some kind of manhunt across all floors of the business.

Adam

I mean, candidly, we've both been in offices where we would be having, you know, full on team wide conversations on Slack with people who are within arm's reach. Because it's just more convenient than opening up our meat holes and saying words.

Jane

Well, yes, I think we're gonna we're in danger of falling into the whole kind of like, why don't people talk to each other anymore? You kind of like texting your partner who is upstairs in your house, please bring me tea.

Adam

Well, because it's more convenient.

Jane

Please bring me tea; as if my kitchen is upstairs.

Adam

Oh, no, you want him to come downstairs, make you a cup of tea, deliver it to you and then go back upstairs.

Jane

It's true. It's true. I don't want much in my life. Just a husband who is also a butler.

Adam

But beyond collaboration tools, there's a lot of digital transformation, kind of adjacent stuff that actually not only works well within the Office, but also kind of needs the office to a, to a large extent, some of the bigger transformation projects around things like data and applications, for example, work a lot better when you can brainstorm in person.

Jane

Yeah. And actually, do you know what you've, you've kind of prompted me to think of something, which is that there are certain digital transformation elements that actually are only relevant in the office. So for example, meeting room booking systems that are online or via apps, that is a purely office focused thing. That is easily part of digital transformation, rather than calling up in whoever it is in central booking or your facilities department to say, you know, can I can I book it for next Wednesday at nine rather than being able to say, okay, right, okay, this meeting room is available at seven. I have late or early meetings. And just book it now; the convenience of digital transformation, even in the office shouldn't be underestimated.

Adam

Yeah, absolutely. So we've touched on this a little bit already. But one of the biggest factors in this whole question is the fact that digital transformation projects take a long time to plan out and to enact. It's, it's a big undertaking, you know, you've got to roll out something that is quite, you know, technically complex to set up, even if it's something as comparatively straightforward as a SaaS solution. And you've got to manage budgeting, adoption, all of these kinds of things. Now that organisations have had to condense all that into realistically, like a couple of months. Do we think that they're going to be willing to immediately start diving in to another one? Or are they going to effectively want to take a bit of a break?

Jane

Yeah, I was gonna say, I think it's a totally legitimate attitude for everyone to want to take a bit of a break, not a permanent break, but just take a pause, and actually kind of assess the lay of the land, what's working? What isn't? Yeah, what of our previous digital transformation plan has been implemented? What hasn't? Is it still relevant the stuff that we didn't put in place yet? Or, you know, so do we want to roll it out over the course of five years, you've got some foundation set to build on, or actually just that need to go in the bin, and we need to reconsider the kind of organisation we are now. And the way that we work now. So I think that everybody take a little break, ever can do with a little break. Just kind of, in general, it's been...

Adam

Step back, take a breath,

Jane

Everybody go outside, look at a tree.

Adam

Touch some grass.

Jane

All of that kind of thing. You know, take a moment in this crazy two years that we've had, and then go, where are we? What do we want to achieve? How do we want to get there? What is the period that we need, almost kind of back to basics type thing, the way you will have started your digital transformation plan in your when you first decided to do this, and also presumably something that you had in mind for the end of your first phase. If it's a five year project, the five years you're not going to be like well, it's great job guys. Well done. Speak to you never, maybe see you at the watercooler.

Adam

But it's worth you know, speaking of that kind of back to basics approach, it's worth remembering that there's a significant amount of organisations who will have had to adopt new business models and new revenue streams in order to keep themselves afloat over the course of the pandemic. And in this is the time now, now that things are just starting to open back up again, this is the time to look at those new revenue streams, or even, you know, revenue streams that some of your competitors may have opened up that you haven't yet, to reassess. Okay. Which of these do we want to keep? Do we want to pursue and expand some of these new areas and some of these new models that we've started exploring? Do we want to kind of put those on ice and go back to focusing on our core business, because a lot of those considerations will be affected by the technology that you have and the technology investments that you're willing to make?

Jane

Yeah, example that I can personally think of is So during the pandemic, a greengrocer local to where I am teamed up with a cheesemonger. And as far as I can tell it called a shop to offer delivery of. You can get your cabbages and your strawberries and whatever, and a nice, you know, kind of slice of Brie, and some Fairy liquid delivered all together. And I guess for those guys, for all three companies, the question will be, do we want to carry on collaborating? If so, how are we going to do it? Do we want to upgrade our website in the meantime? Because it's a little bit on the basic side? And, and that that counts, that counts as digital transformation. It doesn't have to be something called like big and whizzy and wow.

Adam

Yeah, absolutely.

Jane

And is it genuine business question for their future.

Adam

So the question that I keep coming back to is, now that organisations have got a bit of breathing room, you know, the immediate need to set these programmes up has sort of passed. Should organisations keep up the momentum and keep investing in digital transformation? Or is it time to take a bit of a breather and take stock in the current lay of the land and assess their next move?

Jane

I don't think it's really workable, to keep up the momentum. For most organisations. It was a state of emergency. That was why they brought everything forward, or indeed, brought in stuff they've not thought about previously. And I think that no, you can't keep up the same momentum. But that doesn't mean that you should let yourself stagnate either. Taking a breather is fine, as I say, to kind of assess where you are, in fact, it makes total sense to do that. Take a little period of recovery. And then you get ready to plan your plan, start doing your initial assessments, you need to keep some momentum, you need to do some stuff, because this is a continuous work in progress. But you don't have to do it all as rapidly or frantically as you have done over the course of 2020 specifically, and also probably going into 2021. Hopefully not 2022.

Adam

Fingers crossed!

Jane

Our Christmas episode, and new year episode for 2020 will be a bit bleak otherwise.

Adam

Yeah, and for any organisations that are, you know, having their first experience of digital transformation over the last 12 months. This isn't how it's always meant to be.

Jane

It's not normally like this.

Adam

But yeah, I am inclined to agree with you. It's definitely worth slowing down, not stopping necessarily. But organisations should absolutely slow down, take their foot off the gas and just think about what they want, what they need from their IT and how they can sustainably put in goals and programmes to achieve that without having to burn the candle at both ends, as they have been doing for the last 18 months.

Jane

Well, unfortunately, that's all we have time for this week. But do check out our show notes where we will have links to all of the relevant articles and podcasts on this topic.

Adam

You can also follow us on Twitter at @itpro as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Jane

Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts, never miss an episode. And we'll be back next week with more analysis from the world IT and until then, goodbye.

Adam

Bye.

We all know how drastically COVID has up-ended normal working practices. Organisations had to radically rethink their strategies around digital business, remote working and much more. But after 18 months of breakneck digital transformation, what happens now?

In this episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we’re looking at whether organisations should continue building on the efforts of the last year, or whether it’s time to step back and take a break from digital transformation.

Highlights

“There's a bit of a misconception that collaboration software, and Slack, and Teams, and all of those platforms are built for facilitating remote working, which is not entirely true. They are great for remote working, and for enabling remote workers to connect with their fellow colleagues. But they're also really good for in-office collaboration, because while talking over the desk, for example, is great and an excellent way to collaborate and whatnot, the ability to rapidly communicate with even other people within the same office, in different departments, to share files and folders, to ping over links, to collaboratively work on documents. All of that stuff works equally well, whether you're based on the next desk over or in another country.”

“I think it's a totally legitimate attitude for everyone to want to take a bit of a break; not a permanent break, but just take a pause, and actually assess the lay of the land. What's working? What isn't? What of our previous digital transformation plan has been implemented? What hasn't? Is it still relevant, the stuff that we didn't put in place yet?”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Remote working: Are you ready for the new normal?
• Three keys to a long-term remote working strategy
• UK gov flip-flops on remote work, wants it a standard for all jobs
• SMBs rethinking return to office amid Delta surge
• How LSE is using digital technology to shape the future of higher education
• How to manage people successfully from a distance
• How COVID accelerated Kreston Reeves’ agile transformation
• The IT Pro Podcast: Will we ever go back to the office?
• Out of office - on forever: Meet the companies leaving the office for good
• Assessing your cloud strategy after COVID
• Neo digital transformation
• UK's growing skills gap could stall COVID recovery
• Five reasons why digital transformation is essential for business growth
• COVID-19 has sped up digital transformation efforts
• How to spot a failing digital transformation project
• Even cutting-edge firms need digital transformation
• Cutting through the red tape of government IT
• AWS warns of the dangers of digital stagnation post-pandemic
• Using digital transformation to thrive rather than survive
• UK the 'most digitally advanced country in Europe'
• Seven steps to successful digital innovation and transformation
• Why IT projects fail and how to make yours a success

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Small and medium-sized businesses continue to adjust their workplace models in response to COVID-19, the latest research from JumpCloud has revealed, with 62.7% taking steps to mandate vaccines.

JumpCloud’s ‘2021 Impact of COVID-19 on SMEs’ report surveyed 500 decision-makers from organisations in the UK and US, looking at the impact of the Delta variant on businesses, how they are making adjustments to the workplace, as well as what the future of the SME workplace may look like.

The findings show SMEs responding to the variant with incentives to require vaccination, adjustments to the physical workplace, and a future commitment to remote work.

“SMEs continue to exhibit great resourcefulness, flexibility, and initiative in responding to the pandemic and the Delta variant,” commented Rajat Bhargava, CEO of JumpCloud.

“As an SME ourselves, we know the current conditions are extremely fluid, and like the majority of respondents, we had to rethink and delay our office return and hybrid workplace options.”

In terms of mandating vaccines, 62.7% of those surveyed said they have already taken steps to do so. In the UK, the figure is slightly lower at 57.6%.

However, JumpCloud found that the country is split on this: 72.8% of companies in Greater London are taking steps to mandate vaccinations, while just 44.9% of the rest of the UK are doing the same.

More than half of those UK SMEs mandating vaccines (56.9%) will offer special incentives to encourage vaccination, the report revealed. Of those, 75.6% of respondents offer paid time off work to get a vaccine, 57.3% offer a holiday with proof of vaccination, and 52.4% offer cash or other form of compensation.

With regards to how businesses are currently working, 9.2% of respondents said they never left the office, while 19.6% still work remotely. 39.6% are now back in the office, and almost a third (31.6%) are now working in a hybrid environment.

Currently, more than half (53.2%) said they are rethinking the return to the office - while a further 14.8% have already pushed back their return to the office date.

Changes to return-to-work plans include social distancing (61.7%), limiting the number of people in the workspace at any one time (60.2%), requiring masks or PPE (47.4%), upgrading air filters or HVAC equipment (48.9%), as well as adding physical desk dividers (45.1%).

The survey also found that 71% of UK SMEs will now be offering a work from home solution indefinitely for its employees.

Infostretch has partnered with INDIASHIELD, India’s emergency response service, to expand citizen-led COVID-19 support services in India.

The Infostretch-INDIASHIELD partnership builds on Infostrech’s Ignite philanthropic program.

INDIASHIELD is run entirely by volunteers — currently over 500 individuals — all of whom are committed to reducing the impact of the ongoing pandemic. With over 100 partners, the service aids citizens across 150 cities and towns. Support services include providing accurate information about vaccination options, locating nearby hospitals with vacant beds, and more.

Further enhancing this platform, Infostrech has developed intelligent software that lets volunteers and support groups connect with those in need.

Using said software, INDIASHIELD handled 114,000 requests for help, 74,000 of which came in over the last two months as India dealt with a Delta variant of the virus. INDIASHIELD is supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS), WhatsApp, the government of Maharashtra, Zoho, Make My Trip, Haptik, and TEDxGateway, and others.

“Catastrophes can bring out the best in people and we have seen that first-hand with the heroic work that INDIASHIELD’s volunteers have been undertaking,” said Rutesh Shah, CEO and founder of Infostretch.

“We knew we had to help and what we could provide was a data and communications infrastructure that would remain stable and would support them for the duration of the crisis. We are proud that we could play a part in helping them as they help thousands of people in need.”

INDIASHIELD founding team member Yashraj Akashi said, “If ever there was a time to pull together and work for the common good, it is now. It is sadly not an exaggeration to say that lives have been lost due to information not reaching the people who need it. Our role is to fix this information gap and that’s why the support of companies like Infostretch has been invaluable. It allows us to provide a reliable service and connect the dots at a local level so that people get the information and medical attention that they need.”

As the pandemic worsens, Infostretch continues to support global and Indian initiatives to reduce the impact of the pandemic. Earlier this year, Infostrech hosted a global digital hackathon called HACK2VAX to investigate new and innovative approaches to solving the global vaccine distribution challenge.

Continuing its partnership with the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Palantir will help distribute COVID-19 vaccines for the second straight year.

In the U.S. and abroad, Palantir has been instrumental in mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting more than 100 organizations, including the UK's National Health Service, the US government and military, and more.

The HHS commissioned Palantir to develop Tiberius in mid-2020. Using the Tiberius platform, federal health officials could track the production, distribution, and administration of vaccines across the country.

The renewed contract will continue Palantir's support for Tiberius. In collaboration with HHS's Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), Palantir will help strengthen the US’ COVID-19 vaccine distribution strategy, facilitate international distribution, and improve the equity and efficacy of vaccine programs.

Palantir's Tiberius integrates disparate data sources into a common operating picture, allowing organizations to make informed decisions. Additionally, as part of its one-year contract with the government, Palantir will help distribute US-donated vaccines worldwide.

“We are proud to have supported HHS in administering one of the most successful and rapid vaccine rollouts in the world,” said Akash Jain, president of Palantir USG.

Jain added, “As new variants emerge and pose a renewed risk to public health in the United States and around the world, we are humbled to have earned the confidence of HHS once again to help support its lifesaving work.”

Earlier this year, New York state officials unveiled Excelsior Pass, a free smartphone app that verifies recent negative PCR test results or vaccination records.

On the contrary, the head of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has warned that plans to introduce COVID-19 vaccine certification are unlikely to succeed until ministers gain public trust.

Laura Dawson, CIO at the London School of Economics, has spent the past 12 months establishing a range of collaborative systems and services to help people login and carry on learning from home. It’s been a challenging 12 months, but it’s also been an intense learning period for Dawson and her team.

In just a matter of days last spring, Dawson and her IT colleagues secured remote links, sent out Windows 10 laptops, and established cloud-based services such as Zoom for the provision of online education. Twelve months on and these technologies are helping Dawson, her colleagues in the IT department and the educators and students they serve to work productively and effectively.

So how did Dawson support her organisation during its shift to online learning and what are the key issues that academic organisations will need to consider as they use digital technology to help shape the future of education? In many ways, she says LSE was in a fortunate position – while COVID-19 undoubtedly accelerated digitalisation, the process was already underway.

Internal expertise

Dawson also says LSE is lucky to be able to draw on the experience of Dilly Fung, a forward-thinking pro-director of education who is keen to explore new and engaging approaches to teaching. Fung’s research around the connected curriculum aims to find ways to foster strong relationships between students and educators.

“So that whole-of-life learning approach was very much the kind of thing we were looking at when we were exploring the future of education,” says Dawson. “We were already thinking about, ‘What does digital education look like? What does research-based education look like, how will we service that and how will that look in the longer term?’”

When lockdown came, Dawson and her senior colleagues had the opportunity to answer some of those questions. “That was all about getting the teaching going as quickly and effectively as possible,” she says, reflecting on the rapid adoption of online learning methods.

Once again, she says LSE had a number of advantages: the institution had already established VPN connections to support secure remote access. LSE had also implemented the collaboration platform Microsoft Teams. Two weeks prior to lockdown, the IT team was able to ask every department to work at home as a beta test for socially distanced working.

“We asked everybody to go and test it and come back to us and tell us what they thought: How did it work, what worked, what didn't? That gave us quite a lot of insight into the sort of things that we’d need,” she says.

“There was a weird moment days before lockdown where just about everyone in the IT department was updating Windows 10 machines and getting them sent out to staff. But we managed to work very well with our third-party partner; we managed to get the machines that we needed, and we dished them out.”

Choosing the right software

The second key element of technology provision involved the establishment of the online-learning environment. Cloud technology played a crucial role here: While the institution was already using Teams for collaboration, it decided to use Zoom as its video-conferencing platform for online lessons.

“We did that because we brought the right people into the room within the first week of the pandemic,” says Dawson. “We went with Zoom because that is the best way for us to get our students online and give them a great experience. So we'd done the due diligence, but we did it really quickly – and that just freed up the discussion.”

LSE also used the online-learning platform Moodle to help deliver assessments. Once again, the team took a similar approach – they made a decision to move the assessment process into the cloud and brought key people together to make decisions and implement systems.

“We created a small sub-team and they went off and did it,” she says. “They got the technology implemented by almost working like a start-up. There's still more work to be done around honing our approach, but they did it and we were able to deliver assessments.”

Taking the next steps

This rapid but successful digital transformation process has helped LSE and Dawson to develop a much stronger sense of what the future of higher education might look like. What she envisages is a hybrid form of teaching that’s different to before the pandemic. Yes, face-to-face learning will remain but the use of online lessons will also rise.

“What we’ve proven is that education can take place online – what we maybe need to think about now are our skills for maintaining that,” she says. “I think hybrid just needs to be really good. And a successful hybrid is where you are bringing people into the classroom with people who are not in a classroom together in a really equitable way.”

It’s also important to recognise that online learning remains a constant work in progress. During the first lockdown, Dawson’s team had to pivot to provide socially distanced IT support to people who weren’t in the same location and who were trying to deliver online learning.

As social-distancing restrictions eased, conversations turned to the hybrid teaching environment and the blend of offline and online teaching methods. There was a significant piece of work around turning physical teaching spaces into COVID-safe spaces with fewer seats. For those who were still unable to attend in-person, the IT team has continued to provide online teaching.

Dawson says it's important to recognise just how far the move to online learning during the coronavirus pandemic has helped to boost the electronic educational experience, particularly in the case of asynchronous teaching, where teaching materials are posted online and learners work through them in their own time.

The future of education, says Dawson, might involve a whole range of emerging technologies, from virtual reality through to even more advanced forms of educational engagement. She refers to an example from the Imperial College Business School, which became the first institution to deliver live lectures via hologram.

Dawson says this technology is “really cool” and provides a way to get more people together when international travel is impossible. Yet it’s also important to recognise that these technologies are at the cutting edge and are far from replacing traditional forms of learning or even video-conferencing systems.

For many institutions, such as LSE, the coronavirus pandemic has represented a burning platform for the adoption of e-learning. For Dawson, the priority now is to make the most of the technology that’s been implemented and to build on those gains.

“I don't necessarily think there's any special magic technology that we need in order to create fantastic online learning. I think confidence is the key thing; people now know that they can actually deliver education online,” she says.

Due mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of smart devices in the average US home has more than doubled over the past two years, according to a new Deloitte survey.

The survey of 2,000 consumers was ostensibly about the public's appetite for 5G service. Along the way, the study found some revealing facts about how Americans are using digital devices in the home.

About 38% of Americans added more internet-connected devices to their homes during the pandemic, including smartphones, laptops, smart TVs, tablets, and gaming consoles, the survey found. The average U.S. household now has about 25 such devices, compared to only 11 in 2019.

With adults working at home and children schooling at home, millions of consumers upgraded their mobile data plans and home broadband networks, often adding Wi-Fi extenders. The pandemic also drove demand for online shopping, fitness options, and medical appointments.

"The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was like a time machine that suddenly propelled us tens of years into the future," Deloitte vice chairman Paul Silverglate told Reuters.

The survey also had several other telling results.

For many of us, it's becoming too complicated to manage our connected devices. Nearly one-third of US consumers (31%) feel overwhelmed with the task of managing their various smart devices and digital subscriptions.

With 66% of households equipped with smart home devices, nearly 40% of those smart device owners paid for faster internet speed at home.

For those planning to switch phones or cellular providers in the next year, the top reason is to get 5G connectivity.

The survey also found that 58% of US households have a smartwatch or fitness tracker, and 14% of the device owners bought them after the pandemic started. About 55% of respondents use these devices to track their steps, heart health, calories, or sleep.

Finally, the survey found that over 50% of US adults had virtual doctor's appointments in the past year — 82% of those were satisfied with the experience.

The last 18 months or so have been a disruption unlike any other for tech chiefs and their teams.

In many cases, it’s been largely thanks to IT teams that businesses were able to keep running when the pandemic hit. From enabling a shift to remote working almost overnight to transforming entire business models, IT departments have achieved more than we would’ve expected in normal circumstances in the office - and they’ve been able to do it from afar.

Working from home has been so successful for teams of all types that industry experts predict post-COVID workplaces will be a hybrid model of mixed home and office work. And, with studies and surveys proving that many employees want to hold onto the flexibility and increased productivity of home working, why should we force an unnecessary return?

According to research from the University of Strathclyde and the University of Manchester, fewer than one in ten workers want to return to the office full-time, while 78% would prefer to be in just two days or less and 31% want to work from home permanently.

There are many reasons why hybrid or remote working might not be a good idea - compromised security, concerns about company culture like Apple’s Tim Cook gave as reason for planning three days in-office, or, as Rishi Sunak believes, the ‘spontaneity’ of in-office work is unbeatable and employees will leave without it.

However, many employers are on board with the idea of hybrid work that fits their employees’ needs, and believe there’s no going back to pre-pandemic norms.

Take Nitin Chaturvedi, chief digital and technology officer at KFC Global, who believes businesses will probably end up with a hybrid model, where employees are in the office for some of the week and at home for the remainder. "I think most people probably agree on that," he says.

The Chartered Institute of Personal Development (CIPD) reports that 40% of employers expect more than half their workforce to work regularly from home after the pandemic. That's quite a shift – prior to COVID-19 only 5% of the workforce worked mainly from home, according to the Office of National Statistics.

But if hybrid working is to become the new normal, how will CIOs manage their IT teams? What lessons have they learnt during the past 12 months and what does successful leadership from afar look like?

A change in culture

The CIPD research suggests the move to hybrid working will require a significant culture shift, with new ways of working and associated policies and practices. The good news, as the great work-from-home experiment moves to the operational phase, is that CIOs have learnt valuable lessons from supporting remote working during the past 12 months.

Lily Haake, head of the CIO practice at recruiter Harvey Nash, says IT chiefs must focus on staff demands. Her firm's research suggests a quarter of digital leaders think the majority of employees will continue to work predominantly from home. CIOs will have to think very carefully about how they motivate their disparate workforce.

"One thing CIOs should be preparing for is how to ensure that people are engaged, rewarded and productive in a world where physical presence is just less important," says Haake, adding that tech chiefs must keep a careful eye on employee retention.

The things that have traditionally tied workers to their employers, such as a short commute, have become irrelevant while working from home. If CIOs aren't careful, they could easily lose their top team members to rival organisations who are offering more money or perhaps a better employee experience, says Haake.

"Finding ways to keep people motivated remotely is a minefield and people are striving to find the perfect solution," she says. "Honest communication and recognition are crucial. It's also really important to shout about what your people have achieved; make sure that they're recognised for the amazing things they do."

That's a sentiment that resonates with Laura Dawson, CIO at the London School of Economics, who believes empathy is a crucial element for motivation. She says successful leaders have remained open and accessible to anyone in their team during the pandemic – and they'll continue to use similar tactics to ensure remote workers feel connected.

James Maunder, CIO at private hospital The London Clinic, also believes it's important to focus on strong personal interactions. Executives who manage people successfully from a distance ensure they maintain human connections, which have a tendency to get lost when people don't bump into each other at the water cooler.

That can mean setting ground rules for work, too: "If I see one of my team members repeatedly messaging me on a Sunday, for example, I will – with curiosity – explore why they feel they need to work on a Sunday," says Maunder.

A new approach to business

CIPD and Microsoft research suggests that the workday is often longer at home, with one in three (30%) UK employees working beyond their shift. The research suggests employees also miss meeting colleagues in person, with 65% saying it's what they miss most about the office. The conclusion from the research is that bosses must focus on worker wellbeing.

Thankfully, the most effective managers have learnt during the past year that leading from a distance requires a new engaged approach. Rob Doepel, partner at consultancy firm Ernst & Young, says traditional command and control tactics are unlikely to work in a world of work where your people are spread across a range of locations rather than the next desk.

"It's about having the power, confidence and trust in your teams to pull yourself back and give them space," says Doepel. "Trust the process, step back and think about what you can do as a coach and empower your team, and not switch back into, perhaps, a different way of leadership that we know is not as effective."

While leading from afar hasn't always been easy, the best managers have learnt during the past 12 months that empowering staff to make their own choices has produced big benefits. As Boots UK CIO Rich Corbridge suggests, tech chiefs have often had to give their staff leadership opportunities – with unexpected benefits.

"We've moved people around into new roles," he says. "People who've never touched marketing before are now leading martech projects. We've got people who hadn't done real leadership roles that have been able to shine in such a way because of this environment and they're now leading big teams doing important work."

Such forms of empowerment are promising. Just as there's now probably no return to the presenteeism of the past, there's also hopefully no return to the traditional command and control styles of leadership. The best leaders have gained the confidence to let employees set their own work agenda – and, in the long term, that should provide benefits for everyone.

Tech jobs aren't what they used to be.

Emerging tech jobs have a strong data management and analysis component, which was less common just a few years ago, according to a report from The World Economic Forum. Additionally, newer technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are gathering steam in all industries, with the demand for technologists skilled in this area growing steadily, too.

Speaking to IT Pro, Maynard Williams, managing director and UKI intelligent engineering services lead at Accenture, explains that tech jobs are now more than just technical knowledge. "According to our recent Tech Vision research, 77% of business leaders report that success is dependent on their technology stack. However, attracting and developing the right tech expertise is just one piece of the puzzle; understanding technology isn't just a job for the IT team, [it's] an enabler of wider business transformation. Therefore, all leaders also need to have a strong understanding of its capabilities and vision of how it will change their operations and services."

The bounce back in the economy, the lifting of lockdown, and a steady return to work have all contributed to a positive outlook for jobs and skills, with cloud, AI, and robotics vacancies, in particular, increasing notably. Indeed, Microsoft research is bullish, stating that by 2025, the number of tech jobs in US firms alone will increase five-fold, from 41 million to 190 million.

In the wake of COVID-19, the tech jobs landscape has seen clear job trends: With mass remote working came the need for flexible cybersecurity that was often lacking in many enterprises. With workforces set to become remote permanently, cybersecurity skills will be in great demand throughout 2021 and beyond.

Along with the increased need for security skills comes the ever-expanding use of cloud-based applications and services. Recruitment firm Hays expects cloud engineer and cloud architect jobs to become the top areas businesses will look to recruit to across 2021.

Aude Barral, the co-founder of the developer recruitment platform CodinGame, tells IT Pro the pandemic has shifted the priorities of businesses looking for tech talent: "Cloud applications and services allowing organisations to support remote workforces has seen high demand for DevOps engineers with cloud migration and infrastructure expertise. This highly specialised position responds to the growing business demand for scalability and security related to software as a service (SaaS), ever faster websites, containerisation, cybersecurity, and accelerated cloudification experienced during the crisis."

Businesses are re-shaping their processes and digital transformation strategies that consider their market sectors and industries post-COVID-19. "As the pandemic continues to disrupt operations and objectives, the skills required to maintain business continuity are likely to remain in flux," says Andrew Duncan, partner and UK CEO at Infosys Consulting.

These new business development roadmaps require a multidimensional workforce. Pre-pandemic, agility was often the stated goal of many enterprises. To achieve this, business leaders embarked on education and training programs to expand their employees' skills. Today, appreciating how relationships with their customers and commercial partners have changed influences the vacancies they have and what groups of skills they are looking for in new recruits.

Tech jobs landscape

There has also been a shift in how businesses approach the skills they need. The rise of low-code or even no-code application development has enabled some businesses to remove their need for highly trained technical staff.

Application development is increasingly becoming part of individuals' and team skills. Companies can see those closest to day-to-day business problems become empowered to create technology-driven solutions themselves.

Matt Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, sees a new future where tech skills are not just the province of IT. "Just a few years ago, no one would have thought advertising and marketing managers would need to configure software, or that software developers would need the skills to build rapport with customers. But advancing technology is creating both new opportunities for workers and new challenges for employers trying to fill roles."

This view is shared by Eleanor Weaver, CEO of Luminance, who explains how her company approaches tech recruitment: "Whilst a lot of our employees in the Cambridge office have experience in software engineering and come from a STEM background, this is not absolutely necessary. We hire young, clever people who are able to understand and pick up new tech concepts easily. Being a software expert can be helpful and is a bonus, but is not everything, and I think this broad approach has helped us to hire some great talent that we can go on to nurture."

Jobs on the rise

Tech jobs are also evolving. The Demand for Skilled Talent report from specialist recruiter Robert Half shows a shift towards a hybrid skills approach, which they define as more soft skills. For example, vacancies for software developers who can 'establish customer rapport' have increased by 51%, compared to a 208% rise in calls for advertising and public relations managers with software configuration skills.

Matt Weston, managing director of Robert Half UK, concludes tech skills will evolve to meet the new business landscape the pandemic has created. "From a skills evolution and demand perspective, COVID-19 can be seen as the ultimate disrupter and accelerator," he says. "With one recent report estimating that 21 million UK workers will need basic digital skills and 14 million enhanced interpersonal and advanced communications skills by 2030, the time to take constructive steps in developing hybrid skills is now – particularly for those companies eager to build more resilient, adaptable, and agile workforces needed for their pandemic recovery efforts."

The future of the tech skills market will be influenced – perhaps for decades – by the pandemic. Returning to 'business as usual' seems unlikely. As companies radically altered how they operated during the pandemic and how their workforces have also changed, this will influence how they develop and innovate in the future. As James Milligan, global head of technology at Hays, concludes, tech skills are now a much more complex and multifaceted asset all enterprises are defining.

"Organisations around the world quickly adapted to the challenges of country-wide lockdowns and made the necessary alterations to their operating models in the short-term to react to the changing environments. Now, they are starting to take a more proactive look at their futures, and need the help of project managers, change management specialists and those with experience in agile methodologies to assist them with this transition, as well as developers to build the digital applications required by their employees and customers."

A post-pandemic tech job landscape will be very different, with traditional distinctions between jobs and disciplines becoming less well defined as business leaders see they will need people with a broad skill set that isn't totally tech-based. Tech vacancies are now more customer-facing which illustrates how critical interpersonal skills supported with tech knowledge are in great demand.

Acuant and Airside are teaming up to develop a privacy-first mobile identity verification solution to help customers return to pre-COVID normalcy.

As part of their partnership, Airside will integrate Acuant’s security solutions into its Digital Identity App.

The Airside Digital Identity App lets individuals securely add and share their verified identity data with a business for a specified period, giving them complete control of when, where, and how their data is shared. The platform can also verify passports and U.S. drivers’ licenses.

Per reports, a new version of the app will include COVID data to improve health status monitoring.

“Enabling shareable IDs and health data is an important step in ensuring we can efficiently and safely return to some sense of normalcy, but data privacy is a top concern,” said Yossi Zekri, president and CEO of Acuant.

“People need to know the technology they’re entrusting with their personal information has a consumer-first stance on privacy. By partnering with Airside, we are making a convenient and safe return possible, while putting consumer privacy first.”

The Acuant-Airside partnership is geared toward linking users’ COVID test results and vaccination records with their verified identities.

A complete biometric ID verification requires users to scan and upload authorized IDs and take a selfie using the Airside Digital Identity App. An integrated facial recognition system and instant identity verification by Acuant assure anti-spoofing and fraud protection.

The jointly developed solution will allow for consent-based biometrics sharing at airports, hotels, entertainment and sports venues, and more. Users can keep track of the information being shared and revoke access as needed. Digital privacy is ensured by not storing users' personal information or images in centralized databases and using end-to-end encryption.

“At Airside, we stand by our motto ‘Privacy First. Human Always.’ and work with partners who believe that those fundamentals make the biggest impact,” said Amena Ali, CEO at Airside.

“Our technology is open and interoperable and it’s been easy to integrate with Acuant’s state-of-the-art technology, which speaks to their more than 20 years of expertise ensuring that secure digital identity is accessible to all.”

Stamford-based health screening firm TestZone has partnered with Australia-based Leash IT to help companies keep employees safe as they return to working in offices following the coronavirus pandemic.

TestZone will use Leash IT’s LeashView platform to enable firms to maintain social distancing. The technology uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with analytic capabilities to help organizations carry out proactive social distancing, reliable contact tracing, and access control monitoring. It will also assist in limiting the number of people per room or area.

The LeashView platform allows a company's existing ID badge to intermittently emit Bluetooth pulses that determine where wearers have been and who they might have encountered. This technology will work alongside TestView’s other tech, including symptom screening, hygiene, sanitation measures, behavior change communications, fully staffed onsite and at-home viral testing, and contact tracing.

Forty organizations in Australia, Thailand, the UK, and Israel, including hospitals and medical research institutions, have already installed LeashView.

David Orelowitz, TestZone co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), said that while more citizens get vaccinated, coronavirus is still prevalent in most parts of the world.

“This is a critical time for industry. It's never been more imperative we get people back to work in a safe, effective manner,” Orelowitz said.

Orelowitz added that LeashView was the technology his company was looking to integrate into its core offerings so it could help ensure businesses, sporting events, concerts, film productions and more, “stay open and people stay employed.”

Tony Lotzof, CEO at Leash IT, said a strategic health security program is now “imperative for any arena, business or school and needs to become the new normal for organizations of all sizes.”

“The combination of TestZone and LeashView provide the scientific expertise, data and traceability to protect staff and assets and mitigate any risks before they happen, and we are very excited to be on the front lines of this effort with the experts at TestZone," he added.

COVID-19 health passports have gained traction recently. At the end of March, New York announced a voluntary digital app that verifies an individual's recent negative PCR test result or proof of vaccination. Major venues, including Madison Square Garden in New York City and Times Union Center in Albany, New York have announced plans to use the technology in the coming weeks.

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has revealed it thwarted more online scams during the pandemic than it had done in the previous three years combined.

COVID and NHS-themed cyber crime fueled the increase, with security experts recording a 15-fold rise in the removal of online campaigns in 2020 compared to 2019.

The findings were included in the NCSC's annual Active Cyber Defence (ACD) report, which was released ahead of the organisation's CYBERUK event this week.

It reported a significant jump in the number of phishing attacks using NHS branding to trick victims, while the COVID vaccine rollout was used as a lure in email and text messages to gain people's personal information for fraud. Some 43 fake COVID apps were also taken down by the security organisation.

The ACD programme also includes a 'Suspicious Email Reporting' service which the NCSC said had been "hugely successful" since its launch in April 2020. The service received nearly four million reports of malicious emails from members of the public in its first year.

The organisation also worked with a number of allies to call out hostile state activity, which includes help exposing Russian-state sponsored attacks on COVID vaccine facilities.

"The ACD programme is truly a collaborative effort, and it's thanks to our joint efforts with partners both at home and internationally that we've been able to significantly ramp up our efforts to protect the UK," said Dr Ian Levy, the NCSC's technical director.

"This has never been more important than in the last year, where it was vital for us to do everything we could to protect our most critical services and the wider public during the pandemic."

In a separate report, Kaspersky has also warned that vaccine-related scams have continued to increase in 2021.

The cyber security company said its experts discovered various types of phishing pages distributed all over the world. As well as spam letters, recipients are being invited to get a vaccine, to take part in a survey, or are offered products to diagnose and treat the virus. Again, these are NHS-branded phishing attempts that aim to steal victims' personal information to be used for fraud.

Much like accountants themselves, accountancy firms often have an unfair reputation for being stuffy, risk-averse and a little behind the times. The finance sector generally isn’t the first to adopt emerging technologies, often preferring to play it safe and wait until products have proven themselves before cautiously dipping a toe in. Sometimes, however, you have to jump in with both feet, and the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organisations to jump-start their digital transformation efforts.

For London-based accountancy firm Kreston Reeves, the onset of remote working wasn’t a radical departure from the norm. The company runs eight offices throughout the UK, and has been using Citrix’s virtual desktop and application products for the best part of a decade, delivered on top of Nutanix’s hyper-converged infrastructure. This, combined with cloud services like Microsoft 365, gave the company a strong existing foundation to build on when COVID forced staff out of their offices.

“Prior to the pandemic, we were quite relaxed about people working from home,” says Kreston Reeves IT and operations director, Chris Madden, “although on a realistic day, you may have perhaps 40 people working from home and the rest would be in an office or client meetings – so you've probably got about a 500 versus 40 split, which is probably typical for our industry. We were moving towards an agile working model, but hadn't quite got there. And then obviously, the pandemic struck, at which point everybody worked from home, whether they wanted to or not!”

Face time

While the company’s existing Citrix deployment meant that staff were already able to access all their usual applications while working remotely, collaboration was taken care of by a rapid rollout of Microsoft Teams, which Madden says has been invaluable for collaboration both inside and outside the business.

“We went into the pandemic, got everybody set up, and then immediately started pushing out Microsoft Teams, particularly video conferencing, within our Citrix environment,” he explains. “That meant that people were able to carry on face to face communication, but more importantly with our clients, because [they] have an accountant they want to get advice from, and it's a lot nicer if they can still see their accountant, even if they can't get in the same room.”

The biggest surprise, he says, is how quickly the company has adapted to home working. If the business and its employees hadn’t been forced to change their behaviours and mindsets, he speculates that it would still be talking about how to roll remote working out.

“The only issues that we had, really, were getting everybody set up on the remote access apps to get the security codes for the two-factor authentication, and also any other apps they needed. So there was a rush to the help desk and the IT team to say 'I need all this set up immediately' from about 500 people, but in terms of the technology stack, it was there, it was working, and it did what it was supposed to do, which was quite a relief.”

From a hardware perspective, the shift to home working required additional investment in peripherals like headsets, webcams, docking stations and external screens, but it also gave Madden and his team the opportunity to replace the Dell Wyse thin-client devices used by many employees with laptops. The Citrix add-on for Microsoft Teams didn’t play nicely with the thin OS the company’s Wyse terminals ran on, he says, so rather than upgrading all of its thin-client devices, the company chose to pivot to laptops for all. This approach also gives the benefit of a single, consistent user experience for all its staff whether they’re at home or in the office.

Accelerated agility

This feeds into the firm’s plans for post-pandemic transformation; once things open back up, Kreston Reeves is going fully agile. The company implemented a desk-booking system earlier in the pandemic to help with risk management and social distancing for staff who had to be in the office, and plans to use that once lockdowns lift to support a hot-desking environment.

“Hopefully, that will enable better collaboration,” says Madden; “you'll get to know your colleagues a lot better. By giving everybody laptops and having the desks set up the same, it means you can just plug in at any old desk that you happen to be using. And so hopefully it should mean that we’re making more productive use of the space.”

Madden anticipates that this new model will involve staff working from home for roughly half the week and says that this flexibility has been a hit with staff, as it allows them to save time and money on their commute. As part of this process, Kreston Reeves has also reevaluated its use of office space, and plans to downsize its London premises.

“I think what it's allowed us to do is look at our property footprint, what we're using offices for, and why people want to go into an office. That's feeding into our review of our office space and what we're going to need for the future; so we’re looking to move our London office, and if this was done a few years ago, we'd have probably carried on with a desk per person,” he says. “Now we're going into a location where there will be about 30% fewer desks than people.”

Another major change that COVID has enabled is the use of remote collaboration with clients. In addition to video conferencing with clients, recent regulatory changes have allowed Kreston Reeves to audit customers’ accounts remotely, rather than sending a battalion of auditors with laptops to their premises. This, Madden says, will save staff a lot of time that would previously be spent travelling up and down the country.

“I think it will bring a lot of changes, and I think it will probably mean people are more productive, probably get more out of their day. But that also means they probably get a better work-life balance, because it's not all about working ever more hours, and because you haven't got a commute, it's an extra hour of work. It's about giving that hour back and saying, well actually, we can get everything we need you to do in that time scale, and you've now saved yourself several hours of travel time a day, and that's back for you.”

Looking to the future, the company has started experimenting with AI and robotic process automation technology to improve its operational efficiency, and is planning to invest more heavily in cloud services for back-office tasks. Madden explains that although the accountancy industry is still reliant on niche on-premise software products, many supporting services can be transitioned to cloud-based equivalents to take advantage of cost and availability benefits.

“I think the sector as a whole is a cautious sector, which is one of its strengths and one of its weaknesses, depending on your point of view. I do think it's accelerated, and talking to some of my peers, there’s very much a sense that the pace of change is quicker.”

“The key thing for businesses is, how do you capture that willingness during the pandemic to move at pace and be willing to change, when you're now back in the offices? And that's going to be the biggest challenge for businesses, I think.”

Plans to introduce COVID-19 vaccine certification won’t work in practice unless ministers make efforts to earn public trust, the head of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has claimed.

The government is considering developing a form of vaccine passport to help businesses and wider society safely open up as restrictions continue to ease, in the form of Digital ID that can be used to access services or gain entry into businesses.

Any such programme, however, whether developed by the government or a private company, will require the buy-in of the wider public in order to function as intended, the information commissioner Elizabeth Denham has warned. It also isn't good enough to simply expect trust or adoption based on what the wider social benefits may be.

“The obvious benefits of data-driven innovation in both the public and the private sectors rely on trust, and we’ve seen that clearly over the past year, from contact tracing apps to data-sharing to help vulnerable people who are shielding,” Denham said, speaking at the 2021 Data Protection Practioner's Conference.

“The example that’s dominating the headlines now of domestic vaccine certificates is another good example. The success of any COVID status scheme will rely on people trusting it, and that means having confidence in how the scheme would use their personal information.”

She claimed that although there are concerns, developers involved in building the contact tracing apps across the UK, including the devolved nations, had previously shown a keen interest in maintaining user privacy at every stage. There was also a real recognition of the value of public trust and engagement, she added, although that doesn't mean public trust can be taken for granted in future.

“There is simply not an option today for any organisation,” she continued, “public or private sector, to say "how we use data is complex, but this service is important, so just trust us". And that applies just as much to COVID status certificates, as it does to social media companies or app developers.”

For months, the government has been toying with the idea of rolling out a form of digital certificate that people must present to prove they’ve been vaccinated, or have recently returned a negative test, as restrictions lift.

While it’s a highly contentious measure, transport secretary Grant Shapps confirmed plans were underway to integrate this so-called vaccine passport feature into the NHS app. Digital privacy experts have previously urged caution due to concerns that any data collected may be used beyond the scope and timeline of the pandemic.

Similar warnings were sounded in the lead up to the rollout of the NHS COVID-19 app as well as the manual NHS Test and Trace programme. The key charge was that uptake would not be high enough for these schemes to work if the public’s trust wasn’t secured.

The NHS COVID-19 app, for example, underwent a rocky development process and may have risked losing trust among the public as a result.

Ministers were keen at first on developing a centralised version rather than relying on the decentralised blueprint provided by Google and Apple. This is because the government’s original plans involved collecting location data to map areas with high infection rates. These efforts were abandoned, however, due to security issues and bugs, and the government instead opted to develop an app based around the decentralised model.

The manual NHS Test and Trace programme, too, raised eyebrows when it was launched without officials having conducted a data protection impact assessment (DPIA). Alleged shortcomings in the way the project has been managed have also resulted in privacy campaigners taking legal action against the programme.

Details around the incoming vaccine passport scheme are scarce, including when it may launch. However, it’s widely expected to be an important step in the government’s post-COVID roadmap.

This article originally appeared in the March edition of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

The COVID pandemic has forced a radical shift in the way we work. Since March 2020, when the government first advised that everyone should “start working from home where they possibly can”, businesses have been forced to ditch traditional workplaces and transition to a remote-first way of working.

While the shift was undoubtedly frantic and stressful for many organisations, particularly those that previously required employees to endure long commutes and overpriced lunches five days a week, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the pandemic has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past. As a result, many companies are now figuring out that working remotely is the future of work, public health crisis or not.

While it’s likely that hybrid work – a mix of remote and office-based working – will become the norm for the majority of once-office based employees, some companies are ditching the office for good. Twitter, for example, has told employees that they can continue to work from home indefinitely and Microsoft, though initially wary of home-based working, has also given its staff the option to ditch the commute for good.

Dropbox

Another big name embracing remote working is Dropbox, which recently announced it’s becoming a “virtual-first” company. Not only will working from home become the norm for employees, but the remote experience will go one step further with “non-linear workdays”, meaning core collaboration hours will be set up with overlap between time zones, with employees encouraged to design their own schedules beyond that.

Andy Wilson, director of new products initiatives at Dropbox, tells IT Pro that the company is already reaping the benefits of a virtual-first approach – and not just because its San Francisco headquarters recently sold for a record-breaking $1.08 billion (£777 million).

“Over the year, we've seen the obvious benefits of a virtual first approach. We've been able to live out our product truths; being a distributed team, building for distributed teams,” says Wilson. “Our employees have had more control over how they work, and as we move out of lockdown, they're going to have more flexibility in terms of where they can work.

“While shifting to a virtual-first model, we must provide the right tools to enable our employees to collaborate as effectively as possible. Video calls are key, but other tools are important to get work done. By using our own tools such as Paper and Spaces, the teams were already working together asynchronously across the globe – it quickly became normal for us to collaborate on projects across time zones.

“We’ve also been adopting popular applications, such as Slack, to create a more effective and productive virtual way of working. For example, we recently moved our IT support to work across Slack – this has improved response times and allowed team members to gain instant support wherever they are.

“As we build teams from around the world, our ability to brainstorm in co-authoring tools like Paper means that teams can hand off work, or ideas, to others in different time zones to pick up. It’s something that we’ve seen our customers pioneer as they move projects and content across time zones to speed up delivery.”

Panaseer

It’s not just big name technology companies that are leading the charge. Panaseer, a continuous controls monitoring platform for enterprise cyber security, has also recognised that, after a year of successful remote working, it has become a viable long-term solution.

Sophie Harrison, chief of staff at Panaseer, tells IT Pro: “We closed both our London and New York offices during the lockdown, to test a new remote working model. Our leadership team managed the communications, as we recognised this was a fundamental shift in working practices. We implemented a number of tactics to ensure our team were engaged in both the decision and new working model, including running weekly surveys and developing a cross-functional 'winning from home’ group to garner feedback.

“We have developed collaborative initiatives to ensure our employees feel supported and still part of a team. This includes a monthly productivity allowance for all employees to assist with running home office costs, an Amazon voucher to ‘pimp’ the home office and passes to use co-working spaces. Our social team has run games nights, group activities and weekly HIIT classes.”

These initiatives have received an overwhelmingly positive response from Panaseer’s employees, Harrison says, which is why the company now plans to implement remote working on a permanent basis.

“We are committed to maintaining our culture and values virtually, and we are constantly measuring our team's satisfaction. Our leadership team has set an example by communicating more appropriate flexible working guidelines and offering better remote meeting and internal comms practices.”

HomeHero

HomeHero, an AI-powered digital home manager that helps users to run all of their services from one platform, also has no plans to return to the office.

Internal employee research at the start of the pandemic found that a significant majority of HomeHero’s team supported a permanent shift to remote working. While flexible and remote working has always been a part of the culture at HomeHero, the business is now a remote first organisation, with no plans to return to the office.

Kenny Alegbe, founder and CEO, HomeHero, said: “We’ve had nothing but positivity from our team about the move to being a remote first business. I hold weekly company wide updates to keep the team informed and connected and we have a ‘bunker’ in Central London, that the team can use for workshops and brainstorms whenever they want (and restrictions allow).

“We have found that not only has remote working boosted morale and productivity, it has also facilitated a fantastic work life balance for our colleagues.”

The business uses Slack, Notion and Google Hangouts as part of its day to day business tools and also supports team members in funding remote office spaces near to their home, as well as kitting out personal offices too. The team is also keen to keep that Friday feeling with a variety of social events being hosted on Google Hangout, including sunset drinks in Mykonos, wine tasting in Provence, film club and a cocktail masterclass.

“The people at HomeHero are driving this business to be a success and I want to give them whatever they need to continue on this trajectory,” Alegbe added. “I have listened to the team and we are now a remote first organisation and we will continue to evolve our ways of working to ensure they work best for the team.”

34SP

Similarly, Manchester-based WordPress web hosting company 34SP has been so impressed by the results it saw from staff working remotely, it has decided to shift to this way of working on a full-time basis.

Stuart Melling, business development director at 34SP, tells IT Pro: “Before COVID-19 hit, we routinely offered WFH as a staff perk. This meant that one day every week, an employee could choose to work from their home, or indeed any remote location. This meant we were particularly prepared from a tech stand point (Slack, Zoom, VoIP, VPNs etc), and with the start of the pandemic we naturally sent everyone to work from home, and indeed, they remain there today.

“Everyone was a little apprehensive about what the change would mean in terms of productivity but what we found really surprised us. In all areas of the company, things have materially changed for the better. In our customer service department we’ve set a series of records in terms of quality – as rated by our own clients.

“As 2020 started to come to an end, we were so impressed by the results, we announced the change would become permanent in 2021. Some of our staff have decided to relocate around the country, and indeed, internationally given the flexibility afforded. Everyone’s fairly thrilled about the change, and as business owners, we are too.

“I can’t imagine why we’d force people to return just for the sake of it. I keep reading that some have struggled with knowledge sharing, mentorship, creativity etc, but for us, we’ve just re-imagined new ways to undertake all those tasks and improve on them.”

The heads of Google and Microsoft have announced that they will help to fight the growing coronavirus crisis in India.

Google announced that it’s putting up 135 Crore INR (£13 million) in new funding for India, including two grants from Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org. The first is to GiveIndia to provide cash assistance to families hit hardest by the crisis, and the second will go to UNICEF to help get urgent medical supplies to where they're needed most.

This will also include donations from Google’s employees, with over 900 members of staff donating 3.7 Crore INR (£359 million). The funding contains a further 112 Crore INR (£10m) increased Ad Grant support for public health information campaigns, helping audiences with messages focused on how to stay safe and facts about vaccines.

“Devastated to see the worsening Covid crisis in India,” wrote Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet.

Furthermore, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, also pledged to support India.

“Microsoft will continue to use its voice, resources, and technology to aid relief efforts, and support the purchase of critical oxygen concentration devices,” he said in a tweet. He also thanked the US government for mobilising to help.

India and South Africa were the two countries who tabled a motion at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in October 2020 to allow members to temporarily waive the application of some rules that are part of a global intellectual property treaty until widespread vaccination is in place globally, according to the NGO Human Rights Watch.

Over 100 governments now back the proposal, but a handful of high-income countries are blocking it, including the US, UK, the EU, Japan and Australia.

This isn’t the first time that big tech companies are getting involved in contributing to fighting the virus. In January, Salesforce, Oracle and Microsoft committed to creating a digital vaccine certification system to help identify people who have had the COVID-19 vaccination. The group is called the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) and were developing a tool that can be stored on mobile devices and easily accessed by apps.

Plus, in April 2020 the NHS started working with Apple and Google to build a contact tracing app designed to track the movements of the population when the restrictions put in place were lifted. The software was to allow for users to declare whether or not they have COVID-19 symptoms and determine if they had been in touch with anyone.

After a year of forced remote working, lockdown restrictions are finally starting to ease, and organisations are starting to plan their return to the office. But once physical workspaces reopen, will we even want to go back - or has the last year given us a taste for the benefits of working from home?

In this episode, we speak to IT Pro staff writer Sabina Weston to discuss our experiences of remote working, the impact of generational differences on attitudes to office culture, and whether or not we’re looking forward to being back in the office.

Footnotes

• Coronavirus creates new challenges for women in tech (and every other industry)
• International Women’s Day: Where now for women in tech?
• The benefits of a remote-working model
• UK gov flip-flops on remote work, wants it a standard for all jobs
• Three keys to a long-term remote working strategy
• City firms consider axing office space as remote work continues
• Why can’t tech firms decide on working from home strategies?
• 90% of Brits want to continue working remotely
• The IT Pro Podcast: Staying sane while working from home
• If employees are to work from home then the office network must move with them
• What are employers' responsibilities when we use personal tech to work from home?
• Microsoft research suggests hybrid work is here to stay
• Google warns hybrid working could hinder its 'corporate culture'
• How do IT leaders prepare for a refusal to return to the office?
• Research says 63% of employees are more productive working from home
• Staff will quit if not allowed back into the office, chancellor warns
• Why video conferencing is so tiring and what you can do about it

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Google Cloud has expanded its Intelligent Vaccine Impact solutions (IVIs) platform to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

The expanded IVIs platform now includes a Contact Center AI (CCAI) with intelligent virtual agents that understand and offer real-time responses to customers' vaccine queries 24/7. Customers can use various methods to contact an agent, including chat, text, web, mobile, and phone.

Through a secure web channel, CCAI’s virtual agents can also direct users to local resources, answer questions, and provide assistance at each step of the process, including registration, eligibility, locating vaccination sites, and appointment scheduling process. Furthermore, callers can alter their appointment time or date over the phone instead of logging into a website.

“This technology is especially important in reaching those with limited technology proficiency; those without access to a computer, a smartphone, or the internet; and those who are non-native speakers, as CCAI supports up to 28 languages and dialects,” comments Mike Daniels, vice president of global public sector at Google Cloud.

Built on Google Cloud’s industry-leading Conversational AI, CCAI also offers protection against fraud and threats. Most notably, virtual agents within the CCAI platform allow public health agencies to automatically update their responses in real-time for rapidly changing questions related to vaccine eligibility.

For instance, CCAI has helped New York’s state government deliver real-time answers to New Yorkers’ most pressing concerns about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. A 25% reduction in incoming calls was achieved via the CCAI program, as constituents used virtual agents to obtain information and answers. This allowed the call center personnel to devote themselves to more unique questions and cases.

“The virtual agents will not replace human agents, but will provide a menu of interactive options. AI assisted call centers can expedite the delivery of information, triage calls and streamline the final resolution based on the needs of the individual. To accommodate the diverse New York population, the State also provided enhanced options by enabling the virtual agents to understand and respond in Spanish, with plans to add more languages soon,” added Google.

Around three-quarters (72%) of enterprises have moved one or more applications from the public cloud back on-premises, according to research from Virtana.

The top reasons for the change included the applications should not have been moved to a public cloud in the first place (41%), technical issues associated with public cloud provisioning (36%), degradation of performance (29%), and unexpected cloud costs (20%).

As the cloud has become a vital component of almost every business' IT infrastructure – especially since COVID-19 took hold – many enterprises that rushed their expansion of hosted applications are now re-evaluating how they create, manage and deploy cloud services.

Speaking to IT Pro on the publication of the report, Kash Shaikh, President and CEO of Virtana, explains how a cloud deployment should be handled. "Critical applications should never be rushed to the cloud,” he says. “There is really no reason to do it when there are partners and platforms that can help ensure applications will run smoothly in the public cloud and for the right cost.

Creating a multi-cloud environment that can meet the challenges businesses face today and how their IT infrastructures will need to support their processes and remote staff in a post-COVID-19 landscape, is critical to get right.

Taking a step back and evaluating how cloud services are bought and integrating into a business should be a priority for all CTOs. After weathering the initial COVID storm, now is the time to closely audit how cloud services may have proliferated and how these can be rationalised moving forward.

Repatriating data

How applications and the data they rely upon are used is now very different than it was before remote mass working has become the norm. In its 2021 Hybrid Cloud Report, NTT encapsulates the current drivers behind the hybrid cloud, stating: “Business continuity, resilience, and agility are the priority business objectives.” The pandemic's practical impact is, in some cases, an underestimation of the network infrastructures needed to support the rapid changes enterprises had to cope with.

The security of data at rest and in motion has never been more critical. Cloud services, by their nature, offer consumption-based flexible environments, yet the visibility of these services can be opaque in some instances. This lack of transparency can lead to a loss of control and low levels of security. As digital transformation continues, it is essential to increase visibility levels to ensure data security is robust.

How any given business uses data can be a practical guide when decisions have to be made whether more public cloud services are used. If large quantities of data will be in motion across several network endpoints, there is a case for moving it out of the public cloud.

As the quantity of data businesses will have to manage expands thanks to IoT, for instance, focusing on the unique requirements this data needs to deliver efficient value will be the core guide to whether on-prem, public or hybrid cloud deployments will be required. It’s no surprise that this re-evaluation of cloud deployment had given rise to new services such as HPE Greenlake.

Tracy Woo, a senior analyst with Forrester, believes the HPE model could offer the secure flexible cloud services all businesses will need. "Most datacentre purchases are heterogeneous or under one brand, [products] like Greenlake offer folks a ‘capacity on demand’ model that is primarily a financing and contractual vehicle to enable incremental purchases. As hyperconverged systems gain traction, full-stack infrastructure solutions for compute, storage, and network become inseparable and are subject to subscription- or consumption-based pricing paving a future for businesses like Greenlake and also Dell’s Project Apex.”

A hybrid future?

Post-pandemic, it's clear more distributed resources will be used to support remote working and, critically, secure resources. Here the rush to expand cloud services to keep vital networks operating often meant securing these services was not a priority. Post-pandemic, this must change.

NTT found that 93% of organisations agree cloud is critical to meeting their immediate business needs, while 88% agree it’s also essential to meeting their future business needs. The hybrid cloud has become the foundation onto which these new services will be built. But the hybrid cloud must be thoroughly evaluated to ensure this structure can meet the needs of the workers using these systems.

As work has changed, so must the cloud services that support the networks business use today and will need in the near future. In the face of an increased desire to use data-intensive technologies such as machine learning, and continuing and expanding cyber threats, it's not surprising many IT professionals are evaluating whether the public cloud can deliver the performance and visibility they need at an affordable cost.

Some of the core reasons for data repatriation identified in IDC’s multi-cloud survey include security ( 25% of respondents) and performance (22% of respondents). Additionally, 12% of European organisations stated that their migration of business applications to the cloud was unsuccessful.

Carla Arend, senior program director for Cloud Research Europe at IDC, comments: "Cloud strategy and data strategy need to converge, and organisations need to have a good understanding of their data estate when crafting their cloud strategy. Data classification is critical to make sure which data can be moved to the cloud and which data should stay on-premises, for example for regulatory compliance purposes.”

No one is arguing for data and applications to move wholesale back on-prem. What is being highlighted, especially now that businesses have gained some perspective on their cloud deployments during the last year, is that a more strategic approach is needed to their cloud strategy.

Shaikh believes a more nuanced and integrated approach is needed. “Although IT applications can be strategic, business owners look for SaaS, PaaS, or even IaaS as options to reduce capital expense, labour, utilities, and accounting. They are in the business of selling products, not running data centres,” he says. “The reason why on-premises data centres will linger around is the time and investment to the critical infrastructure that runs the critical applications that are very difficult to uproot.”

No CTO can ignore the cloud. However, with a working landscape in flux and an expanding need to further embrace hosted applications, a new strategic approach is needed to ensure the cloud services created are fit for purpose.

The hybrid approach is still an option most businesses will choose. However, re-evaluating their application, data access and network needs, might just reveal new approaches to hosted services that could offer the cost-savings, security and efficiency gains needed for their business to thrive post-COVID-19.

While most businesses had a digital transformation roadmap in place prior to the arrival of COVID-19, the massive changes wrought by the pandemic has forced organisations of all types to reevaluate their plans. These new strategies reflect how technology, workforces and their customers alike behave in a post-COVID-19 environment.

According to a report from BT and Cisco, 82% of respondents believe that digitally equipped organisations were significantly less vulnerable to the pandemic's impacts. This has had a clear strategic impact, with 96% saying their customers are now taking a more strategic digital investment approach and 91% saying businesses are prioritising digital transformation plans for the foreseeable future. This highlights key opportunities for businesses in increased agility and flexibility; enhance customer experience, and drive efficiencies.

Technologies that enabled remote working on a mass scale have exploded over the last year. Businesses are now looking forward to assessing how what Gartner calls ‘acute disruption’ will become more permanent as enterprises rebuild themselves in the wake of the pandemic.

Speaking to IT Pro, Paul Kostek, IEEE senior member and advisory systems engineer to Base2 Solutions, says a more integrated use of technology is the key to business success post-pandemic. “The major impact of the pandemic will be how we work, but most importantly, where we work. Technology today, such as broadband, improved capability of smartphones, tablets and laptops, has made remote working easier than expected. Moving forward, we will likely see more global projects as connectivity improves.”

The COVID catalyst

The new normal that has evolved over the past year has a clear technological component. Indeed, in a June 2020 report PwC identified leveraging new technologies and migrating to digital platforms that enable remote collaboration, operational efficiency and resilience as foundational to the post-pandemic way of working. The report also concluded that businesses should ensure their customer engagement models account for the massive shift to online retailing that has taken place.

Many businesses pre-COVID-19 had been sluggishly implementing their digital transformation plans. The pandemic revealed their lack of agility and how legacy systems were stalling their ability to innovate and meet customer demands.

A change in mindset has been forced onto these companies who can see their more dynamic competitors innovating to meet their needs as the pandemic widened. In an October 2020 report, McKinsey found that businesses which quickly experimented with new technologies during the crisis, hiring the right technical talent and focusing on cybersecurity, will have a technical advantage post-COVID-19.

Nick Smith, a partner in technology strategy and transformation at management consultancy Deloitte, tells IT Pro that success during and after the pandemic isn’t just about new technologies and an increased headcount. Many businesses, he says, are using the technologies they have in more creative ways. "I’d argue that we are seeing new classes of technology, but more that we are seeing existing technologies more easily implemented and developed – particularly within data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud and cyber. Used effectively, these technologies provide organisations with the credentials to act with agility and scale, while bolstering their resilience.”

All of the technologies that will form the new digital transformation roadmaps businesses will follow post-COVID-19 will have a data foundation. How companies collect and analyse this information will be fundamental to their success, says Sue Daley, techUK's associate director for technology and innovation. “Data is vital to driving economic growth, productivity, job creation and innovation in the goods, products and services offered by businesses both online and offline.” Daley explains. “Bringing data together with key tools such as data analytics and cutting-edge AI solutions will enable businesses to understand the power of business data and make real time business decisions about their post COVID-19 future plans based on data.”

A digital advantage

Choosing the right technologies to deploy as businesses move out of the pandemic will be critical for CIOs and CTOs. From a business technology perspective, the pandemic has been about quickly adapting to the rapidly changing environment where lockdown presented process and workforce challenges.

The CIO and IT Leadership Survey 2021 from Coeus Consulting gives insights into how tech leadership has also changed, thanks to Coronavirus. Almost 80% of respondents implemented ‘quick fix’ solutions and 82% stated that business and IT leadership played a crucial role in improving ways of working across the company.

Commenting on the findings at the time, Ben Barry, director of Coeus Consulting said: “IT leaders and their teams have had a great opportunity to show their value and will continue to drive the strategic agenda in 2021 and beyond. This increased visibility and the business’ dependence on IT has given them an opportunity to demonstrate that IT leads in terms of business transformation and should be funded accordingly.”

Innovating at speed to meet customer and commercial partner expectations have meant in many cases a business-wide pivot to uncharted technical territories. The retail space, for instance, is now almost unrecognisable from a year ago.

According to IBM's COVID-19 and the future of business report, 55% of respondents said the pandemic has resulted in permanent changes to their organisational strategy, while 60% said they had adjusted their approach to change management.

Change – and change at speed – now define the new digital transformation strategies all businesses are following. As Laurence Buchanan, Partner and CEO at EY Seren explains: “The past 11 months have shown that we can introduce new technologies at a much faster pace than previously thought possible. However, there are certainly lessons to be learned: Those who have successfully introduced new digital technologies have typically had a strong foundation of agile ways of working, extreme customer centricity and an ability to test and learn. Others have had to build this new muscle memory fast!”

COVID-19 has changed business and customer relationships forever, and commercial partners in the B2B space are also rapidly changing their supply chains. Digital transformation roadmaps that were in place prior to March 2020 will inevitably be outdated in a post-pandemic world.

EdTech, FinTech, digital health, collaboration tools, enhanced cybersecurity platforms and more automation, will all be key components of the new technology landscape. Businesses must adapt to these changes, maintain an agile mindset as their markets, customers and partners emerge from their COVID cocoons.

This article originally appeared in Issue 14 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

The great remote working experiment has been going on for so long that office life is slowly fading from memory. The banter, the pub lunches, cake on birthdays, it’s all too distant to recall now. But what about the people who have started a new job during the pandemic – how has the experience changed for them?

Nathaniel Ayling started working as a technology communications executive at Imagination Technologies in June 2020 having applied and interviewed for the role remotely. Several months into 2021, he is still yet to meet most of the people he works with in the flesh.

From virtual introductions to management meetings, Ayling takes IT Pro through his experience of remote onboarding. What worked, what didn’t and what felt just plain weird.

Tools of the trade

“When it came to onboarding, the first step was the infrastructure, getting sent a laptop, or phone, all the kinds of technology that you use if you're working from home,” Ayling explains. “And then there was the more HR learning side of onboarding.”

Laptop shipments have been increasing steadily during the pandemic, with Chromebook sales “through the roof”, according to analysts at Canalys. While it isn’t cheap to kit your organisation out, it isn’t unfeasible, either. Hot desking was a widely practiced strategy long before the outbreak of COVID and most businesses usually have ample laptop stocks.

Due to the prolonged nature of the pandemic – and the prospect of some businesses never returning to the office – there may be other hardware needs to take into account, such as monitors, desks and chairs. Unfortunately your hardware allocations will be dependent on your employer; a work laptop is often the only tool you’ll get with a new job, as it’s all you need to get started, meaning you may well need to invest your own money in kitting out a home office.

Meet the team

We can all recognise that ‘new kid at school’ feeling on the first day of the job: You don’t know anyone and they certainly won’t have much information on you, so someone is given the task of showing you round and making introductions. Until last year, this was typically an in-person ritual of awkward smiles and handshakes (remember those?).

“The first thing you do in a lot of jobs is you go in on your first day, before you've started anything your boss says, ‘hello’, shakes your hand, and then you get walked around the office,” Aying says. “They introduce you to HR, this department, that department, whoever, and you obviously can't do that when you're remote.”

Instead, Imagination Technologies attempted to recreate the welcome virtually, with an introduction video followed by recorded messages from team managers. This tactic has its benefits – Imagination Technologies has a global operation and Ayling was introduced to department heads from India and Argentina, whom he wouldn’t have met in person anyway. However, it has a significant flaw in that all the communication is one way: While Ayling met the team, the team didn’t get to meet Ayling.

“We've been trying to get to know each other, but I think the one thing that you miss [when] working remotely, especially if you don't know the people beforehand, is just the little vignettes of conversation,” he says. “Those more kind of informal moments where you might just end up on a topic of conversation, or just kind of down a rabbit hole and getting to know people. Those kinds of organic moments of interpersonal discovery aren't quite there.”

Human Resources

Nearly all the tasks an HR department has to go through with a new starter can be done remotely, which was the case long before the pandemic and its resulting lockdowns. Correspondence over email, meetings on Microsoft Teams or Google Hangouts, personal details filed via any number of online platforms – thanks to the steady growth of HR-focused cloud services, there has been little difficulty in this area of onboarding.

The process can still be a little surreal, given our preference for in-person meetings, but the reality is you may never actually meet the people responsible for your transition into the company. Depending on your employer’s plans for the future of office work, this can even mean that one-to-ones with line managers, meetings that assess your probation period or progress reports will be based entirely on how you’ve handled work remotely.

“When people are working remotely, there's got to be a lot more trust, but it also requires active communication,” Ayling explains. “Because if you're new at another job, and you're all set in the office, you can have those kinds of touch points where you get that informal, ad hoc feedback to make a point or just check in.”

“I think it's potentially harder to prove your worth, if that makes sense. Because when you're in the office every day, they can see that you're up and about and moving, but when you're working from home, there has to be an element of trust involved, because they obviously can’t just monitor you the whole time.”

Beyond the pandemic

A study of between 6,000 and 7,000 UK residents during 2020 found that remote working increased 43% and with it a wealth of benefits for a greater life-work balance. From the employee perspective, 88% want to continue working from home beyond the pandemic. But whether they can stay at home is dependent on their employer’s discretion and, in some cases, the industry they work in.

According to LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index, 38% of respondents said they felt their employer would call them back into the office on a full-time basis – reverting back to pre-pandemic life, so to speak. However, 43% said they believed their work would be a mixture of in-office and remote, while only 10% felt their jobs would be completely done from home.

This suggests most new starters won’t encounter remote onboarding after the pandemic, with at least some of it done in person in a dedicated office. When this oft-promised post-pandemic world will arrive, however, is another matter. Even as restrictions look set to gradually lift over the coming months, most offices and workspace will be subject to strict social distancing measures for some time, meaning sitting near some from HR, so they can talk you through your benefits package might not be feasible for at least a year, or even two.

“I wouldn't say [remote onboarding] is better or worse, I think it's ... different,” Ayling says. “At the start of lockdown, everybody on LinkedIn was saying ‘well, looks like the office is dead forever’, but I do miss the office to an extent. I think what we'll probably see going forward, rather than a complete closure of offices, is a much more flexible approach.”

Security researchers have discovered a new, fast-growing black market for COVID-19 vaccine certificates, fake negative COVID tests, and even COVID vaccines on the dark web.

According to security analysts at Check Point Research, the dark net market for false COVID-19 vaccination certificates and negative COVID tests is exploding.

Simultaneously, the EU is discussing plans to introduce vaccine passports that confirm a person is vaccinated. Government officials and experts have touted vaccine passports have as a way to allow vaccinated individuals to travel to other countries, attend events, and more.

In investigations, researchers found fake “vaccine passport” certificates on sale for $150. Fake negative COVID test results are on sale from various sellers for just $25, as darknet vendors seek to capitalize on the demand for proof of vaccinations.

Researchers contacted a darknet vendor to understand the process and get as many details as possible regarding delivery, price, and authenticity. To counter the researchers’ questions, the seller stated they’d done this many times for many people and had no issues with it. Researchers only needed to provide the exact names and dates they wanted on the certificate and pay $200.

The counterfeit coronavirus vaccine prices offered on the dark net goes as low as $500 a dose. Since January, the number of adverts has exceeded 1,200, marking a 300% increase. The vaccines advertised include Oxford – AstraZeneca at $500, Johnson & Johnson vaccine at $600, Russian Sputnik vaccine at $600, and Chinese SINOPHARM vaccine at $500.

Oded Vanunu, head of product vulnerabilities research at Check Point, said the dark net is booming with COVID-vaccine-related activity, but this wasn’t the case when they started studying the dark net on this topic in January.

“Back then, we only saw a few hundred advertisements for just the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. Today, adverts have tripled and offer every type of vaccine available. The new trend we’re starting to see is hackers offering fake vaccination and test certificates as they try to capitalize on the public’s interest in either getting a vaccine early or avoiding the vaccine but having proof of vaccination,” Vanunu said.

Vanunu added that it’s important people understand that attempting to obtain a vaccine, a vaccination card, or negative COVID-19 test result by unofficial means is extremely risky, as hackers are more interested in your money and information and identity for exploitation.

“People who have not been vaccinated and try to use fake COVID test results or vaccine certificates are damaging the fight against the disease. We also strongly urge everyone to not share their vaccination cards or negative COVID-19 tests on social media, as the information on those pictures can make its way onto the darknet in some form. I expect the activity on the darknet related to the coronavirus vaccine to continue to grow in the near-term,” Vanunu added.

In these last 12 months, CTOs and those working within IT departments have faced a year of trials, errors and rapid change.

From providing every kind of mobile device for remote work to equipping machinery or operations to function via the cloud, it has been non-stop for many.

But a lot has been learned during this unprecedented period, so here are 10 top takeaways for Enterprise Mobility.

Rewrite business processes and control costs

The sudden shift to remote meant companies and organisations had little time to adapt existing Enterprise Mobility policies. Keith Thomas, associate director at Coeus Consulting, says: "Speed has driven a higher tolerance to risk, which organisations must now recognise and address. Many business processes were not written with mobility in mind. Tactical fixes can lead to inefficiency or total inability to meet customer needs."

Thomas also believes rising costs will be another critical issue. "Increased public network usage and device purchases quickly mount up. These must be controlled and managed," he adds.

Tracking devices is critical for better business protection

According to a November 2020 survey by the IEEE of 350 CIOs and CTOs, more than half said they can track between 26% and 75% of devices connected to their business (global average 54%).

While the UK fares well at 64%, it's no wonder more than one third of those questioned globally – and 41% in the UK – said security issues related to a mobile workforce was among their top two cybersecurity concerns. This isn’t limited to company-provided devices either, as BYOD was also noted as a security concern by 37% of respondents.

Wearable technology for the workplace will be on the rise

The pandemic's health impacts mean wearable technology could play a greater part in identifying symptoms, stresses and strains on workers, as well as creating operational efficiencies by giving faster access to real-time data in the field.

Shash Anand, VP of product strategy at SOTI, says: "With business-critical mobility becoming more important than ever, wearable devices present exciting opportunities, but also new challenges. The nature of mobile and wireless technologies, and the environments they are used in to support business-critical applications, is not straightforward. However, there is an opportunity for businesses to place mobile technology at the heart of their workforce."

Unsecured Wi-Fi and a lack of authentication will still be major issues

Ivanti's research among CISOs saw 45% of those questioned cite employees using unsecured Wi-Fi to access business resources as a top IT security challenge during the pandemic.The use of personal devices, meanwhile, was a top concern for four in 10 respondents.

With nearly all (92%) admitting they need additional IT security measures in 2021 to better enable remote workers, it might be a red flag that only two thirds planned to invest in mobile threat detection software.

Critically, 57% pointed to improving authentication to remote applications as a top priority this year.

Digital Employee Experience is the next big horizon

Delivering a consistent and seamless digital experience (DEX) out-of-office looks set to be a business critical issue.

Research from Nexthink's latest Pulse report reveals a disparity between the value IT teams place on DEX and the actual quality of experience employees have in a remote or hybrid working environment.

For example, seven in 10 tech leaders reported spikes in their IT ticket and call volume during remote working in the pandemic with VPN issues (77%), poor video calls (65%) and Wi-Fi connections (51%) the top complaints from workers.

Battling burnout among IT incident responders

Among DevOps and IT practitioners across a range of sectors, there was added pressure to resolve incidents in their own time, with 55% asked to do so five or more times a week according to global research from PagerDuty. Four in 10 were 100% focused on firefighting.

Rachel Obstler, VP of product at PagerDuty, says: "Downtime can mean millions in lost revenue. This research candidly points to the human cost of this dramatic change – an immense strain on the practitioners charged with keeping digital services running, which can lead to massive burnout."

Focus on governance and acknowledging IT's importance

Mathivanan Venkatachalam, vice president at ManageEngine, believes the C-Suite must make security issues a top priority, especially when it comes to governance and oversight visibility, if they are to prevent malicious insiders elevating privileges and remotely accessing resources they are not authorised to.

He predicts that IT is going to be taken much more seriously in the coming years than it was before, both in terms of leadership and budgets.

“Last year, we saw the IT staff become frontline workers. Our survey found 83% of respondents think IT will be better viewed and treated after this crisis, although 31% of these expect that greater appreciation will only be short-term."

Employee choice programmes need managing

Companies will now have to cater for greater demand to provide consumer-friendly devices in the workplace. Michel van den Berg, general manager of EMEIA at Jamf, says: "Employees want devices they are familiar with and enjoy using to deliver their best work. We're seeing more businesses offer employee-choice programs to meet their needs while helping them be more productive."

He adds a caveat, however, saying: "A lack of visibility into the device fleet and how they are being used has meant businesses struggle to know when to regularly update and roll out critical apps, software and tools to protect employees. Secondly, the ability to scale up quickly will always be clunky and strenuous if the IT team is having to manually configure devices."

Budgets must keep pace with deployment needs

With many companies and organisations facing tighter financial expenditure, it's no wonder research by Rackspace Technology showed 67% of IT leaders said the pandemic had brought new concerns around budgets.

Helping people to make the right spending decisions may need to be bolstered with four in 10 feeling that while they or their teams are empowered to make IT budget decisions, they lack the skills to do so. This is despite 86% of companies having a dedicated team or individual in-house whose responsibility it is to manage IT budgets and costs.

Demand for DevOps is set to skyrocket

When CodinGame questioned 15,000 developers and HR professionals from around the world, 43% of the latter group admitted they will struggle to find qualified DevOps engineers for their tech teams this year. That role has jumped ahead of Back-End and Full-Stack developers as the hardest position to fill.

But there was some good news for those who are self-taught. Aude Barral, the platform's co-founder, says: "We've also seen more tech recruiters hiring developers who haven't followed the traditional academic route. A computer science degree is no longer a must-have if you want a career as a programmer. With the wealth of online and offline resources available to everyone, coders of all levels of technical competence can improve their programming skills, opening up job opportunities in the booming tech sector."

The government has laid out its roadmap for lifting COVID-19 restrictions, with 21 June the earliest possible date companies could consider returning all employees to the office.

For his part, Prime Minister Boris Johnson does not believe remote working will become the norm. Speaking about people not wanting to commute again or get back to face-to-face working life, he told a virtual conference: "I don't believe it. Not for a moment."

Contrast that to the boss of Unilever, who in January said his office workers will never return to their desks five days a week.

By and large, experts do agree hybrid working will stay 'a thing' but if staff refuse to come back in the same pre-pandemic numbers, how should IT leaders be planning? Should greater levels of remote access be offered even when COVID restrictions are gone? And if so, what are the implications?

Andrew Sellers, MD of Foundation IT, says: "The reality is we aren't going back to the office anytime soon, whatever is announced. The changes brought about by the new forced way of working will be permanent and largely we will all be better off as a consequence. There's still much to do to make sure that working from home actually works, though."

He adds: "Once the tolerance phase is over, we will see significant investment being made in helping people to WFH. By then the balance sheets will show for many that they are better off with people working as they choose.

"As we come out of this, more permanent decisions will be made to WFH and we will see an increase in investment for that purpose."

Sellers could well be proved correct, according to figures from Harvey Nash's UK Tech Survey 2021. It found that 95% of IT professionals want to work two to five days a week from home after the pandemic, compared with only 42% of tech professionals doing so before it occurred.

The right software solutions must be adopted

Simon Wilson, CTO at Aruba UK&I, agrees employees will expect hybrid working to continue and for it to be a permanent option in the future. “The need for businesses to provide a professional remote working environment is non-negotiable; this goes well beyond the annual stipend typically spent on a keyboard, mouse or video conferencing aid,” he says.

"Agile, secure businesses require seamless, business-grade workflow tools that provide significant benefits to management and security. These provide much more control than business to consumer solutions as they allow for the separation of traffic in a network and can ensure the right applications are prioritised."

Data from ECI Partners' Growth Index 2020 found 28% of the UK's fastest growing businesses were planning to switch to permanent remote working and 43% planned to increase the flexibility of working from home. Only four in 10 said they planned to invest in more technology to support it, however.

Mayur Mistry, IT operations manager at mixer drinks brand Fever-Tree, explains IT budgets will have to be reprioritised, especially in terms of security. He says: "Budget will be spent on software that enables support, collaboration and efficiency but also hardware to keep employees comfortable working from home.

"There will also be an emphasis on security, which is where most of the budget will be spent. 2020 showed many organisations gaps in their security so this year they should … invest more in their security either on end points, on-prem and their cloud infrastructure."

He adds: "More employee cybersecurity awareness training is needed. We have increased it monthly and it shows by more employees highlighting phishing emails."

Listening to employees

According to Ricoh Europe's latest research, 63% of European employees trust their company will be more open to flexible working following the pandemic, meaning IT will need to find ways to match the IT requirements with this desire.

Mark Petty, of Littlefish, believes replacing users’ own hardware will be a priority, saying: "There are a lot of new devices in homes as a result of remote working, likely set up rapidly to accommodate the sudden work-from-home order.

"IT budgets for 2021/22 will therefore likely need reviewing to cope with the increased pressure and demand on network security and cloud rollout more generally. Given the increased security risk from things like supply chain attacks, recently brought to the fore by the SolarWinds breach, BYOD culture is likely to phase out as businesses seek to take greater control over their infrastructure and endpoints."

Dan Harding, CEO at Sign In App, suggests the working world is facing “a complete reset", saying: "Hybrid working is here to stay and the right hybrid working model will fast become key to attracting and retaining talent.

"This is a shift in management culture as well as employee behaviour – and one that will require trust on both sides."

IT will look to implement technology that can, and will, create a safer and more flexible environment when an office or a desk is needed, Harding adds, changing the nature of why we go into a business premises to be around colleagues and clients.

"From collaboration to mentoring and simply sharing experiences, face-to-face contact will always be part of the mix, even if that is just a couple of days a month,” he explains.

"Companies will need to think hard about how they are going to entice people back into the office, once they are allowed. Whether it is fear or just a love of WFH, some people will need coaxing."

Congressional lawmakers passed the long-awaited government stimulus bill Wednesday, which included cash injections for federal technology efforts.

The House of Representatives passed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion package designed to help US households hit by the pandemic. It included $7.1 billion in emergency connectivity funding for remote learning and $1 billion for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), a funding hub for federal IT projects.

The broadband money came in the form of the Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF), which would allocate money for schools and libraries to buy Wi-Fi hotspots, modems, routers, and connected devices for students to use for remote learning during the pandemic. The Fund resulted from pressure from education advocates who petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in January for emergency E-rate funding.

The ECF is a separate measure to the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program passed as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act in December.

FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a long-standing supporter of broadband assistance for students, praised the move. "Recent estimates suggest the Homework Gap may affect as many as 17 million kids with recent data suggesting as many as one in three Black, Latinx, and American Indian/Alaska Native students lack high-speed internet access at home," she said. "The Emergency Connectivity Fund could make a major difference in our ability to help these families and students."

The government also made broadband internet access part of the Homeowner Assistance Fund, which allocates $9.96 billion to help homeowners cope with the pandemic. Municipalities could also use money from the $130.2 billion Coronavirus Local Fiscal Recovery Fund for broadband investments, the Act said. States could make broadband investments via the $219.8 billion Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Fund.

The TMF is a funding service passed by the Modernizing Government Technology Act of 2017. Overseen by a Technology Modernization Board comprising IT leaders, it reviews technology projects submitted by federal agencies and grants funding as appropriate. The $1 billion for the TMF was a substantial downgrade from the original $9 billion President Biden first proposed in his stimulus plan on January 20.

Biden's plan earmarked the TMF money to help fund shared services at the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and the General Services Administration, along with other federal IT projects. Biden also called on Congress to change the TMF's reimbursement structure to fund more innovative projects in his January announcement.

The Act also carved out a separate $650 million for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and $200 million for the United States Digital Service. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) got $150 million, while the National Science Foundation received $600 million in funding. It now goes to Biden's desk to sign. The White House announced that he would sign the Act into law today — a day earlier than expected.

One of the starkest consequences of the pandemic is the fragmentation of workforces. Mass working from home (WFH) was at first expected to be short-term, but now looks set to become permanent as companies look to radically alter how they organise and manage their employees.

Businesses have used collaboration tools for decades, allowing individuals and teams to work efficiently together. COVID-19 made these tools vital and a hub around which workers could congregate. However, the speed at which some businesses rolled out these tools to remote workers was often hurried anot strategically planned. Now that enterprises have had time to assess what WFH means to them and what tools they really need to make it work, we may see the emergence of a new age of collaboration tools.

It's no surprise that the fastest-growing apps during the pandemic have been workspace management and collaboration tools. According to Okta's Business at Work report, Miro, an app offering whiteboard functionality for teams, experienced 301% growth; measured by unique users, it grew 449% in just a year.

Deployment of project management app Smartsheet has grown 170% over the past three years. Slack has cemented itself as the leading messaging tool with 190% growth. And deployments of Zoom grew over 45% between March and October 2020, while Webex grew 15% and RingCentral grew 18% during this same period.

Martin Langan, chairman and innovation director at legalmatters, tells IT Pro that his company has been using the cloud-based NetDocuments service to help its 20-strong workforce manage their document loads. “The implementation of NetDocuments has played a big part in enabling the firm to continue ‘business as usual’ operations despite employees being unable to work from its office,” he says. “At present, legalmatters is only scratching the surface of what its employees can do with NetDocuments, and the firm expects further benefits to be realised once COVID-19 ‘lockdown’ measures are eased.”

Tools, then, need to be chosen and deployed carefully to ensure they are fit for purpose, but also, that their end users are comfortable with their features. Legacy systems also need to be taken into consideration – often, several tools will be used together, which can provide integration and security challenges.

With this in mind, unifying collaboration tools will become the Holy Grail of many businesses post-COVID-19 to avoid efficiency declines and ongoing security issues. Zoom’s new ability to integrate with Google Calendar and Microsoft’s Together Mode are examples of how this might look, as providers take the opportunity to make their products more attractive in an increasingly remote-focused business world.

New Tools

Carl Harris, group director at BCS (The Chartered Institute for IT) says there has been a shift over the past 12 months in how collaboration tools are used: “Certainly, at the start of the pandemic, the single biggest change in our use of collaboration tools was not which tools we are using, but how we would use the ones at our disposal differently.”

He adds: “Take Microsoft Teams as an example. Prior to lockdown Teams was a value-add collaboration tool, enabling us to reach employees via a simple video call more easily on those irregular occasions when somebody may be working from home. Now it is an integral part of our everyday working. All daily employee interaction is conducted through the tool, and the use of the tool’s features have expanded from just simple video calling to an extensive use of all it has to offer.”

Jörn Rabach, director at architecture practice Hutchinson & Partners, tells IT Pro his organisation has found significant benefits in melding a specialist remote working and collaboration tool into its existing systems.

“We have recently adopted Inevidesk, a virtual desktop solution which has been developed specifically for the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) sector,” he says. “Most importantly, this solution integrated seamlessly into our existing set-up, allowing the teams to directly work off our London based servers while avoiding the cost and complexity of a hybrid infrastructure solution.”

Fran Nolan, MD of content agency Tribera, explains that her company, too, found itself needing more than the basic level of collaboration platform that everyone flocked to in March 2020.

“We immediately had to get Microsoft Teams as we needed an intuitive way to meet on video as much as possible. We regularly use the chat function too to stay connected and try to keep those collaborative conversations going,” she says. “We then got GetBusy as we were finding we had too many work channels open with email, Slack andWhatsApp so we now use GetBusy which still integrates with email, but the task assignment and completion are a lot slicker.”

Transforming connections

What does all this mean for the future, both of business and of collaboration technology? One type of technology that holds some promise for meetings in particular is alternate reality, virtual reality, and extended reality – with IT Pro having already trialled an example of this in the form of Vive Sync.

Jocelyn Lomer, chief executive at nuVa Enterprises, which develops a virtual meeting room application, explains to IT Pro that while the tools we’ve been using so far have plugged a hole, we need to build on them.

“The desktop video apps are insufficiently rich and do not deliver innovative solutions or allow the mind to range freely,” he says. “Traditional desktop collaboration tools like MS Teams and Zoom have proven to be partly sufficient, but frequently employees are left frustrated, stressed and exhausted from the limitations of the asynchronous tools.”

Shaun Lynn, CEO of channel services provider Agilitas, says that as COVID restrictions subside, businesses will begin to reconsider how they create a more collaborative and flexible workplace outside a time of crisis.

“Collaboration tools need to support this migration, with connectivity and compatibility being key focus areas,” Lynn says. “Like all software-based tools, this will be an evolution rather than a revolution. Market demand will define functionality, and the vendors of collaborative tools who respond the quickest will be the ones to succeed. Like all great tech, some will become the VHS of collaboration tools and others will be Betamax.”

All businesses, no matter their size, have been transforming at speed as the pandemic has re-shaped their workforces. Choosing the right collaboration tools that deliver efficient services to remote teams and individuals are now the cornerstone all companies can build upon. But business leaders should also appreciate that these tools are not just for process management. Collaboration tools can connect remote workers on a personal level. Collaboration is about work, but also reinforcing social relationships that are critical for every employee's wellbeing.

For the first time in almost a year, every single Apple store in the US is now open.

Apple first closed all its retail locations outside China in mid-March 2020. At the time, Apple described the closures as temporary, with company officials hoping to reopen the stores in April or May 2020. Few would have predicted stores would be closed for almost a year.

Since the original closures, many stores have reopened, but they closed again as American coronavirus cases spiked.

The reopening of all 270 US locations is a milestone and a sign that life is slowly returning to normal.

Not every Apple store is fully open for walk-in shoppers to wander inside and browse, though, as some stores are still offering appointment-only shopping. Before heading to your local store, you should go to Apple’s website to check the store’s status.

In addition to opening all its stores, Apple is expanding in-store shopping at more of its locations. For months, many stores have been operating only as Express locations for online order pickup. Dozens of stores in California, New York, and other states are now fully open.

Like many retail locations, Apple stores require shoppers to wear masks. As an additional safety precaution, the stores also operate with reduced occupancy.

Until the stores reopened, Apple found ways to keep its retail stores operating in some fashion, despite the pandemic. For example, in October, the tech giant started shipping product orders directly from its stores instead of distribution centers. This allowed customers to get their new Apple devices faster and kept stores operating.

The last Apple stores to reopen for business opened Monday in Texas, where a brutal winter storm that knocked out power in much of the state delayed their reopenings.

As for Apple stores worldwide, they’re mostly open except for about a dozen in France and Brazil, according to the company.

On a sobering note, there’s no guarantee that all 270 US Apple stores will remain open. The tech giant is continuing to evaluate COVID-19 conditions nationwide, and some stores could close again - or become Express pickup centers again.

According to a new Trend Micro report, pandemic-related threats contributed to a marked rise in cyber security threats in 2020. The company saw 62.6 billion cyber security threats in 2020, a 20% increase.

The Trend Micro 2020 Annual Cybersecurity Report noted a slew of pandemic-related attacks as online criminals seek to exploit the crisis. Trend Micro detected nearly 16.4 million pandemic-related threats, mostly stemming from spam.

As the pandemic sent employees out of the office, Trend Micro noted a rise in attacks on remote workers' homes. Attacks on devices in homes rose 210% from 929 million in 2019 to nearly 2.9 billion in 2020. Trend Micro saw the number of routers subject to inbound attacks rise from 1.14 million in 2019 to 1.49 million in 2020 and noted that those suffering from outbound attacks, in which malicious actors used routers to launch further attacks, also rose.

Overall, the report estimated that 15.5% of routers connected to Trend Micro's Smart Home Network system suffered inbound attacks.

Brute force attacks topped the inbound attack attempts on home devices, with attempts on NETBIOS SMB usernames reaching 1.4 billion and RDP-based brute-force logins reached 618.5 million in 2020.

The report also saw attackers targeting VPN software, capitalizing on vulnerabilities in Fortinet's VPN and the Pulse Connect Secure VPN. The company detected almost 800,000 probes of the Pulse vulnerability, noting it had been used in attacks delivering the Sodinokibi ransomware.

Trend Micro discovered 127 new ransomware families in 2020, 34% more than it found in 2019. A notable new entrant was the Egregor ransomware, which ranked in the top 10 for detected infections despite its initial detection coming in September 2020.

Despite Egregor's success, 2017's WannaCry is still the most-detected malware family by far, with 220,166 detections infected. The next most popular was Locky, with just 15,816 cases.

Governments were hardest-hit by ransomware attacks, with 31,906 cases. The second-most affected sector was banking, with 22,082 cases.

Trend Micro also noticed an interesting trend in phishing attacks. The number of non-unique phishing URLs decreased slightly, while the number of unique phishing URLs blocked increased from 161.7 million to 194.5 million. The company stated attackers might be targeting their victims more with custom URLs.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Amazon for worker mistreatment at two New York facilities. The company failed to protect employees adequately from the COVID-19 virus, instead prioritizing productivity and profit, the complaint says.

James' lawsuit focuses on JFK8, a fulfillment center in Staten Island, and DBK1, a Queens distribution center.

"Amazon’s flagrant disregard for health and safety requirements has threatened serious illness and grave harm to the thousands of workers in these facilities and poses a continued substantial and specific danger to the public health," read the document filed in the New York Supreme Court.

The complaint alleged Amazon focused on productivity at the expense of worker hygiene, sanitation, and social distancing. The company examines data from the digital scanners that workers use to assess their performance and may issue "automatic discipline" for those workers, according to the complaint.

This limited the time workers had to sanitize appropriately in an attempt to maintain the company-imposed mandatory “line speeds,” the complaint added.

Amazon said it’d suspended this procedure, but the complaint claimed it didn't inform employees of the change for months. The complaint also stated Amazon had resumed the practice.

According to the court filing, the e-commerce giant also failed to comply with state requirements for cleaning and disinfecting its facilities after workers were found to be infected. Amazon also allegedly failed to identify and notify those workers' potential contacts unless the worker presented a test result or a doctor's note, which was particularly difficult early in the pandemic when tests were scarce. Amazon instead relied on surveillance camera footage to track contacts, which James said introduced unnecessary delays.

The company was hostile to workers who complained, firing Christian Smalls, a manager who complained about conditions at its facilities, and issuing a final written warning to another, said James. She added this had a chilling effect on workers' complaints.

The court filing accused Amazon of breaking the New York Department of Health’s guidelines for wholesale trade companies. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order on March 18 closing non-essential businesses, but essential industries, including warehousing and fulfillment centers like Amazon's, were allowed to stay open.

In May, Cuomo issued another executive order reopening businesses but insisting they follow Department of Health guidelines for specific industries.

In June, the Department of Health issued specific guidelines for wholesale trade industries that followed CDC guidance issued in February. It required companies to close where infected workers had visited within seven days, ventilate the area, and wait at least 24 hours before cleaning. Businesses also had to log those who had contact with the infected person in the workplace and notify them and the state health department.

Amazon had at least 90 cases of infected workers who’d been at JFK8 within the seven days but never closed the facility and only performed "partial and inadequate closings" of immediately adjacent workstations seven times, James alleges. It also failed to observe 6-foot social distancing rules.

Amazon focused on profit at the expense of worker care at the two New York facilities, said the complaint. It said that the company earned approximately $28.5 million in extra profits from the two centers throughout the pandemic.

James has asked the court to force Amazon to implement better health and safety policies for workers and to pay emotional distress damages to the workers it fired or disciplined. The complaint said Amazon should also issue back wages to Smalls and restore his job.

Amazon, which has abandoned a planned headquarters in Queens, preemptively sued Attorney General James in federal court last week in an attempt to prevent her from issuing the lawsuit. Its suit claimed that workplace safety was a federal issue rather than a state one.

The e-commerce company has been reportedly fighting attempts to unionize at its Alabama facility. If workers there vote for collective action, it would be the first union formed by Amazon workers. Google and Alphabet workers agreed to unionize in January.

For the past several years, advances in fields such as 5G, IoT, autonomous vehicles and AI processing have promised to unlock major new innovations for civic planning and public sector management. Technology vendors and local governments alike have laid out visions for glittering, high-tech utopias where next-generation systems manage everything from traffic flow to collecting the bins.

For the past year, however, COVID has reduced cities up and down the country to veritable ghost towns, stripped of their usual hustle and bustle. In a post-pandemic world, can the same ideas be turned to making COVID-safe cities, or is the dream of the smart city no longer feasible? This week we’re joined by staff writer Keumars Afifi-Sabet to talk about the future of smart cities.

Footnotes

• £90 million 'future transport zones' will fuel UK smart cities
• Poor data is killing the smart city dream
• Are smart cities a disaster waiting to happen?
• Smart Cities: Living in intelligent spaces
• How to beat coronavirus with the Internet of Things
• 'Narrowly-focused' data strategy not enough to build on local government progress
• Remote working shift could lead to "ghost towns", experts warn
• Sidewalk Labs scraps Smart City project over economic uncertainty
• Connexin rolls out UK's first nationwide IoT network
• Toyota plans smart city for Japan
• Smart city tech branded 'invasive' by privacy campaign groups
• Are 5G and IoT really a match made in heaven?
• Smart city misconceptions are alienating the public, MPs warn
• Is the IoT the saviour of the environment?
• Smart cities to become the norm by 2025
• London and Bristol take Smart Cities crown
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“After a week of shelter-in-place, I was just flabbergasted by how intense and exhausting it was,” wrote Jeremy Bailenson, a Stanford University professor, in a piece by Microsoft Research that examined why people found online meetings so much more tiring than the real thing.

On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. In important meetings, we need to be on top form: we need to judge how, when and with whom to interact; think on our feet; and simply be alive to all the messages, verbal and physical, being transmitted. The adrenaline that carries us through such meetings quickly dissipates once they end, leaving us drained.

You’d think that online meetings would be more relaxed affairs. You’d be wrong. “It is a lot more tiring,” says professor Paul Lee, co-director of research at the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust, who along with the rest of his profession has switched to online meetings and consultations. “Previously, we could sneak out for a coffee; nowadays, meetings are back to back. There’s no opportunity for socialisation and our downtime is greatly reduced.”

Nor are these the only factors. The Microsoft study corroborated that remote collaboration is more mentally challenging than in person, with the brainwave patterns associated with stress and overwork much higher. Another Microsoft study confirmed that the high levels of sustained concentration needed lead to fatigue after about 30 to 40 minutes of meetings. In a day filled with such video calls, stress is measurable about two hours into the day. This begs one question: why?

Missing your cue

The visual cortex is the largest system in the human brain. We respond to and process visual data better than any other type of data: The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Recent research found we can extract meaning from images in under 20 milliseconds, which is down at the refresh rate of a decent monitor.

We’re great at visual processing, yet seeing people onscreen is unnatural. Our poor, overtaxed brains must process differing backgrounds from person to person, deal with oddly sized heads (randomly big and small depending on camera and distance) and with differing image quality.

Then there’s a subtle and disturbing set of problems associated with latency, overlap and out-of-sequence responses to stimuli. The delay in feedback to each other, even though it can be measured in tens of milliseconds, plays havoc with our learned social interactions. There are all kinds of subtle cues – head nods, facial twitches, body language – we use to show that we want to speak, or that we agree or disagree. It’s like being in a room full of socially inept colleagues who don’t know when to shut up or interject.

Professor Lee adds another reason why we struggle in big online meetings: “Group calls require the same level of attention as a one to one and it’s much harder for a colleague or the chair to ‘bail you out’ if you lose your flow.”

A window to the soul

Scientists began studying problems with eye contact – known as “gaze misalignment” – in the 1960s. It’s an issue that’s endemic in video calls: We look at people on screen, but the webcam that people see us through is mounted above the screen, which usually means at forehead height if you’re using a desktop monitor, while on a laptop you often end up talking to chins and nostrils. It might only be a few centimetres, but humans are remarkable at social interaction and our conditioned brains tell us that our colleagues are not paying attention as their eyes seem elsewhere.

Similarly, our brains are aware of others based on their locations. In video calls, it’s harder for the brain to notice eye contact irregularities.

Personal space

Size matters! Camera type, desk and seating position, plus the unnatural effects of wide-angle lenses (which accentuate depth effects), not only lead to differences in the perceived size of people but can also trigger “personal space” responses. A head that appears large in your field of vision is associated with someone being up close, decidedly within your personal space. Millions of years of evolution have taught our reptilian brains that when things are that close, it’s either a threat or something a little more romantic.

Then there’s sound. Our auditory cortex is highly developed, which is why differences in audio clarity and perceived volume place a further strain on us during meetings. Visual challenges might be exhausting, but audio issues are even more disruptive: we seem better at ignoring poor visual quality than bad audio. When there are large volume differences between attendees, the process becomes taxing and uncomfortable. Meanwhile, the effects of hearing your own speech as an echo (delayed auditory feedback) is so profound that it’s been weaponised.

So we should abandon video meetings, right? Having experienced many decades of early mornings, long car, train and plane journeys and late nights, I can say with some confidence that video meetings are mostly better than the alternatives, despite all this.

Rather than return to face-to-face meetings as the default, we need to actively tackle the problems.

Fighting back

The common experience in video calls puts participants in their personal little box, tiled across your screen. But the discontinuity of everyone in a call having different backgrounds fragments this view, making it harder to pick people out.

A technique I’ve tried in my business, and with some success in Teams and Zoom thanks to their support for virtual backgrounds, is to have attendees use the same, simple background. A plain white room works well. We also took photos of our office and used those. It certainly felt more joined up, more like we were in a shared space rather than an eclectic collection of different rooms.

I’m not a huge fan of the “switch to active speaker” feature in most video calling solutions. In real life, I rarely see people teleport into my field of view. Film directors love this kind of cut because it creates tension and pace – I remain to be convinced that it makes for a good meeting experience. I prefer to pin the people I want to watch, either because they’re the main speaker or because I want to pay attention to their body language.

Some collaboration tools are trying to take things further. Microsoft is introducing Together mode, which places all participants in a virtual room, lecture theatre and the like. It shows promise, but it urgently needs to normalise how large everyone appears. Still, it’s a less expensive investment than the specialised cameras and screens that the likes of Cisco would love you to buy.

Handling issues of latency is harder. These inevitable delays mean people inadvertently talk over each other or miss their cue to interject. It’s not their fault. The ping time between, for instance, London and Lisbon is 50 milliseconds – well within our visual cortex’s ability to detect. Calls to Los Angeles see that rise to almost 130ms and Melbourne is a full quarter-second. Double that for round-trip time.

And this delay can’t be solved by technology alone: almost 40% of the Melbourne delay is the time light takes to travel the distance (56ms for 16,900km).

For this problem, we may need to learn new etiquette. Staying on mute until ready to talk, politely raising a digital or actual hand when you have something to say; adding questions via chat for a moderator to coordinate. In parallel, we may need to be a lot more overt with our normally subtle cues, so that attendees have to work less hard at “reading the room”.

Fix with a gaze

Solving gaze misalignment is going to be trickier. The first bit is easy enough: getting the camera at eye level should be on everyone’s list. Using a laptop is no excuse as we’ve known for many years that they should be hooked up to a proper mouse and keyboard with the screen elevated to face height; it’s standard display screen equipment health and safety stuff (which most people seem happy to ignore). But you inevitably look at the faces on the screen, not the camera lens, so appear to be looking at everyone’s hair or whatever is behind them.

We’re yet to see laptop displays where a webcam peeps through the middle of the screen, so a smarter approach is to digitally correct the apparent viewpoint of each person. Until this becomes mainstream, the best we can do is to minimise gaze misalignment through our setup.

We can solve image quality. This is a simple matter of using decent webcams backed by good lighting. You also need to make sure there’s enough bandwidth for the greater upstream demands.

Until tools like Together mode can correct for size, ask people to adjust their camera zoom or reposition the camera distance. You should be aiming for head, shoulders and chest.

Weaponised audio

As with the webcam, the microphone and speakers or headphones should be reasonable quality. Those things that come with your smartphone aren’t going to cut it in most cases. Decent, noise-reducing headphones are a good start, but people wearing headphones in meetings is a bit weird and rarely comfortable for the hours they’re needed these days. I’ve mostly switched to a reasonable quality desk mic and inexpensive PC speakers. If you’re in a private space, experience shows this to be more comfortable and less taxing than the “voices in my head” experience of headphones. Plus, it’s oddly uncomfortable to talk to someone wearing headphones.

It’s vital that everyone works to get their audio levels equalised so that people neither whisper, nor shout.

Equally critical is ensuring that there’s no echo or feedback. The former can happen if you aren’t using headphones so turn the speakers or the microphone sensitivity down. If you’re using headphones, it probably means there’s someone else in the same meeting within earshot. The same is true of feedback. Get noise-cancelling headphones, move to another room or turn everything down. It’s impossible to talk while hearing your own voice as an echo.

It’s also important to eliminate background noise, whether it’s the clunking of the dishwasher or kids’ chatter. In my case, the occasional use of the laser printer is horrendously intrusive. For this, I’ve been using the rather impressive Krisp technology. It’s not perfect, but it helps much of the time.

Two final points about video, which may at first seem contradictory. First, attendees should have their video on if speaking. We get a chunk of the meaning of what’s being said from what we see – leaving video off is increasingly considered to be rude.

Second, consider dumping video altogether if it doesn’t add anything meaningful. “I personally don’t think video consulting is here to stay,” says professor Lee. “We are switching back to phone consultations with patients.” What is lost by switching from video to phone? “Nothing! Patients don’t want to use it and often don’t have the right equipment. Telephone is easier.”

Exhaustion

Early in the pandemic, I was hitting six hours of contiguous meetings on some days. If I were to look back at my Fitbit sleep patterns for those days, I suspect I’d see the impact.

In the real world, we mostly walk between meetings, so get some chance to stretch our legs. Those breaks are important and there’s a handy solution if you book your meetings via Outlook using the “End appointments and meetings early” option (File | Options | Calendar). See the screenshot on the left for my recommended settings.

This brings me to my final recommendation: actively booking focus time. Some teams at Microsoft have “no meeting Fridays”, while Cloud2, the company I founded, has just mandated no meetings before 10am. As we adopt a more connected yet more remote lifestyle, we need to actively guard against any negative effects that may arise. Businesses need to maintain the productivity of their staff. People need to protect the quality of their personal time.

Businesses are no stranger to Active Directory (AD). The identity and access management service has been relied upon by the vast majority of organisations for many years - 90% of them, according to Gartner - but a more agile approach is needed for the hybrid professional work environment that’s now very much a reality.

Indeed, the pandemic shook businesses from all corners and while AD was the reliable backbone of most organisations when all their workers bundled into the same building, the widened cyber attack surface of a hybrid workforce means there are now added complications when deploying AD across a business.

"Active Directory is like the spinal column of an enterprise and it must be closely protected,” explains Matt Lock, technical director at data security firm Varonis. “If an attacker manages to seize control of AD, they effectively hold the keys to an organisation’s digital kingdom and have privileged access throughout the domain, where they can cause serious damage.”

The issues boil down to visibility, it’s much more difficult to oversee all the assets within a business when its workers are so geographically fragmented. Factor in, too, the complexities that come with the rising popularity of bring your own device (BYOD) policies and the way in which workers customise their software with additional assets like add-ons from third-party marketplaces.

Pushing more business processes to the cloud has traditionally been the easy, go-to approach for all-things digital transformation and the deployment of AD is no different. The cloud offers a swathe of benefits to businesses looking to maintain tight security controls across office and remote workers, including a more comprehensive view of the organisation’s digital assets and more streamlined security controls.

With the cyber security landscape now being so wide and businesses being targeted from all angles, it’s more important than ever to have the organisation’s asset management in top shape. Shifting AD to the cloud is the best approach for businesses looking to stay safe in a hybrid working world.

AD transformation

For most organisations, asset management pre-COVID was a relatively straightforward exercise in user and device tracking. Now the working and threat perimeter has moved to the homes of their workforce, keeping track of the entire IT estate and ensuring high levels of security are maintained has become much more complex. Migrating AD to the cloud can deliver more oversight and integrated support to users who need this to secure their equipment and network connections.

Dan Conrad, field strategist at One Identity, tells IT Pro: “Since the rollout in 2000, AD has changed significantly and the impact of Zero Trust campaigns will change this further. At its core, AD is an SSO (Single Sign-On) solution designed for an easy user experience by providing easy access to objects. Active Directory and Azure Active Directory (AAD) have changed the game a bit by still providing the good user experience but detaching some of the vulnerabilities. For instance, the idea of joining every corporate system to the AD is no longer necessary. AAD and solutions such as Intune allow management of the systems without the vulnerability that goes with every system being ‘trusted.’”

Many companies see the continued migration of AD to the cloud as the solution to the issues they face managing the array of assets their businesses use. With security front of mind, migrating an AD to a cloud platform can deliver a level of insulation from some cyberattacks.

The holistic approach to managing what could be a diverse range of devices now being used across your business, requires your control and security systems to change. Businesses are increasingly creating domain-joined and BYOD/non-domain-joined systems to give themselves the maximum flexibility with the assets their staff uses, simultaneously delivering a security infrastructure that is more resilient than a simple cloud or on-prem solution.

The business of consumerisation

The threat surface all businesses now face requires a new approach to network management and device security. As early as March 2020, IDC predicted that within two years, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will have a hybrid cloud deployment. As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, there has been a rush to implement this approach, with businesses being pushed to radically alter how they manage their workforces and the technologies and services they use.

Rajesh Ganesan, vice president at ManageEngine, tells IT Pro: "A cloud-native hybrid IT infrastructure helps organisations respond to change and uncertainty better. That said, even as organisations move to a cloud-first or cloud-dominant approach, it’s important that application, infrastructure, and data security are not compromised.”

Alastair Pooley, CIO of Snow Software, adds: “As we switch to more SaaS applications, you either need to use Azure Active Directory (along with the relevant licenses) or something like Okta to provide that single sign on experience to your staff. Either approach allows you to maintain a corporate directory to control access to resources. It is worth noting that you should re-examine your endpoint security, as traditional group policy (GPO) doesn’t deliver for remote workers. Microsoft’s Defender ATP coupled with Intune is a powerful combination but again you need new licenses to deliver that.”

How your business will manage its human resources and digital assets in a post-COVID-19 environment remains to be seen, as enterprises have yet to make firm plans regarding where the vast majority of their employees will work from. Some workers will return to centralised offices.

However, a high percentage will remain as remote workers. In this scenario, putting place a flexible and secure system to manage your company's assets is a sensible move. The agility migrating AD to the cloud can deliver is a desirable option. Review your business's asset management as it stands today. With some realistic forward planning, you will be able to create bespoke asset management protocols that are right for your staff, and the long-term security of your business.

This article was first published on 01/02/2021, and has since been updated

According to a survey by German software firm Software AG, almost all businesses worldwide have undergone digital transformation projects over the last year, and the coronavirus pandemic was a major driver of these changes.

The survey of IT leaders in the US, UK, Germany, and France found that 97% of IT directors said their companies went through digital transformation efforts in 2020. The same number of directors expect that investment to continue in 2021.

Almost all companies (97%) believe their business is resilient, while 95% believe technology will help them tackle future challenges. Of those surveyed, 90% believe customer expectations will increase in 2021.

However, the survey found some significant differences in opinion on whether to consolidate (50%) or diversify (48%) tech portfolios, whether to prioritize product and process (48%) or customer support and service (52%) improvements.

Of the technologies essential in 2021, global IT leaders listed the following as areas of focus: cloud computing (67%), 5G (51%), artificial intelligence (AI) (43%), and integration (43%).

The report identified three key trends that had happened over the last year. It said that some digital transformation projects had been characterized by delays, limiting their impact.

“The Covid-19 pandemic prompted more digital investment and a requirement to put measures in place quickly. It has shocked transformation efforts back into action,” said the report’s authors. They added that more businesses are now ready to change and are finally at a stage where their technology can transform "the world around them."

The second trend was that millennials had become decision-makers, resulting in companies deploying and embracing technology in new ways.

The last major trend the report mentioned was resilience-building technology becoming more important than big-bang innovation.

“The instability of 2020, and likelihood that it will continue in the future, means that companies see much more immediate and tangible requirements to change. Whether it’s geo-political, healthcare or economic, the factors testing business resilience are simply too compelling to be ignored,” the report said.

Dr Stefan Sigg, CPO, at Software AG, said the COVID pandemic redefined digital transformation in the enterprise.

“While transformation has been an imperative that IT leaders have been championing for years, it took these historic circumstances for many business leaders to make it a priority,” he said.

“The resulting acceleration was nothing short of miraculous, albeit necessary. Organizations had to take some big dramatic steps – and in some cases a leap of faith – to make their businesses work in the most difficult circumstances. The reward is that the benefits will stretch well beyond the pandemic.”

This article originally appeared in Issue 12 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

In September, it was reported that the Royal Mint may stop making two pound and two pence coins for at least 10 years due to a glut of stock. This doesn’t mean these coins are being withdrawn. Indeed, it's more the case that there are far too many currently in circulation, so there’s no need to replace them. One of the main driving forces for this over the course of many years has been the rise of technologies such as contactless payment. Nevertheless, until recently many, if not most, people still used cash for at least some purchases. Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, however, contactless payments, either by card or smartphone, has become the preferred way to pay for both consumers and sellers. Does this mean we could finally be on the cusp of becoming a cashless society?

Speaking to IT Pro, Sulabh Agarwal, global payments lead at Accenture says: “COVID-19 has accelerated the decline in cash, with usage in the UK dropping faster than anywhere else in Europe. We also expect this to drive significant adoption of contactless payments. Our recent global survey of consumers suggests the crisis will drive permanent change to consumer behaviour. However, we don’t expect cash to disappear altogether due to the need for financial inclusion of potentially vulnerable or unbanked people in society.”

This is a problem that has given other nations pause for thought. Other countries – notably Sweden and Denmark – have made great strides towards a cashless society, but even here, governments have slowed their initiatives for fear it may mean some members of their societies are unable to efficiently and cost-effectively manage their money.

Currency matters

For some groups, cash remains their primary payment method and any wholesale move to even a partial cashless society could have an adverse impact on them. Research in 2019 from Which? showed a sharp decline in the number of ATMs available, with one in 10 closing over the previous 17 months. This decline isn’t surprising, as the cash infrastructure across the UK costs the retail banks who run it around £5 billion a year. Reducing this cost is a clear driver behind the rise of cashless payments and a reduction in the access to cash.

The risk is that once the cash infrastructure is reduced or even removed, it's impossible to replace it. Sweden, which has one of the highest adoption rates of cashless payments, recognised the risks and has taken action to slow the trend until more research into the impact this could have on vulnerable groups can be done.

Mats Dillén, head of a Swedish parliamentary committee said: “We need to pause and think about whether this is good or bad, and not just sit back and let it happen. If cash disappears, that would be a big change, with major implications for society and the economy.”

Cash for the so-called ‘unbanked’ continues to be vital. According to the Fair4All Finance survey, there are over a million adults in the UK without a bank account, all of whom will rely on cash to receive and spend money.

The March 2019 report from Access to Cash Review also found that 17% of the UK population – over eight million adults – would struggle to cope in a cashless society. This report refuted the claim that older generations are the most likely to be impacted if cash as a payment mechanism rapidly declined. Instead, it found those who would be the most disadvantaged are people living in poverty.

Speaking to IT Pro, Natalie Ceeney, chair of the Access to Cash Review says: “If we don’t ensure there is a place for everyone in a new digital-only society, we could see the cashless debate develop into one that separates the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. We are already seeing evidence of this throughout the pandemic as the most vulnerable in our society (typically those who are most reliant upon cash) are refused by shops when trying to purchase essential items with cash.

“Therefore, it’s more important than ever that FinTechs, challenger banks, regulators and consumer bodies all work together to develop digital solutions that won’t exclude anyone from a digital society. In the meantime, it’s critical we find ways to protect the viability of cash, for consumers and communities alike.”

Where people use cash is also a critical component to understand in the context of a cashless society. Figures from the Association of Convenience Stores’ 2018, 2019 and 2020 Local Shop Reports showed that 100% of its members accepted cash, and access to a cash machine is consistently rated as one of the most important services offered by this type of shop by customers. Indeed, while the number of free and fee-charging cash machines was steady through 2018 and 2019 – with 46% and 18% of shops offering them respectively – this figure rose in 2020 to 49% and 22%.

There are signs even here of the decline in cash, however. The number of local shops accepting non-cash payments has grown significantly, for example. In 2018, 94% accepted debit card payment, 88% accepted credit card payment, 80% accepted contactless payment, and 63% accepted mobile payment. By 2020, these figures had all increased, with the most significant increases being in contactless payments (88%) and mobile payments (80%). The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has also had an effect, with 69% of shops saying they were encouraging customers to use contactless over other forms of payment.

There are other disadvantages to cash transactions for businesses as well. Those that take cash payments, hold cash on their premises, and then need to deposit cash at their bank, face security concerns. The steady closure of bank branches across the UK has also made it harder to pay in or withdraw physical money.

A cashless future?

Developments in the FinTech sector, challenger banks, and the Open Banking initiative are all converging and cash could eventually fall out of use. To say its demise is imminent, however, is premature.

In a future cashless society, if payment systems failed or were subject to a cyber attack, it could cause chaos. This isn’t an entirely hypothetical prospect, either. The 2018 visa payment network outage caused over five million transactions to fail across Europe – and it only lasted 10 hours. When foreign exchange firm Travelex was taken out by a cyber attack in early 2020, those reliant on services such as payment cards were unable to access their money – branches and kiosks, however, were still able to provide cash. Going further back, the April 2007 cyber attack against Estonia saw bank servers targeted, which in turn brought down online banking services and left cash machines sporadically out of service as well. For a country that had prided itself on being at the forefront of the quest to become a digital society, it was a significant blow.

In light of this, going completely cashless would require robust security systems and infrastructure in place first to avoid outages.

“Digital innovations from FinTech players that have led to the change in consumer payments habits in turn have an impact on British culture and behaviours,” says Agarwal. “However, as the behaviour continues to change and adapt, this breeds further innovation from all kinds of organisations, whether that be challenger banks or incumbent financial services providers.”

“There is no doubt that cash usage in the UK will continue to decline and, as a result … banks, retailers and regulators are working together to assess the options available to continue to enable access to cash for both consumers and SMBs.”

Is cash still king? Perhaps in some business sectors, but change is fast approaching, accelerated by the pandemic. As our relationship with cash changes, and as the infrastructure that supports it erodes, the future of cash as a wide-spread payment mechanism is in doubt. But as we have consistently seen in the past, cash has a very strong survival instinct.

As we’ve been working from home for the better part of a year now, you might expect employers to be fully on top of their responsibilities when supporting people who use their personal tech for work activities. This isn’t always the case, however, so it’s worth familiarising yourself with the responsibilities employers should take when we use personal tech while working from home.

Are we really still using personal tech for work?

If there’s any doubt that we are still using personal tech for work, some sobering research from digital identity management firm SailPoint found that 25% of people in the UK use their own computers for work, while 11% have borrowed computers from family members or their partner.

Reversing the picture, 34% of remote workers in the UK said they use their work devices for personal uses with 64% of these checking personal emails and 60% admitting to doing online shopping. There are security implications, too: 42% of UK employees say their company has not put any additional cybersecurity measures in place in the last twelve months, while 24% said they have shared work passwords with a partner or family member.

This reveals that the blurring of what constitutes work and personal equipment and how this tech is used is still very much alive and kicking. It could create significant headaches for employers.

Getting serious about responsibilities

It’s important for employers to take their responsibilities around all of this seriously. Felipe Polo, a digital-focussed entrepreneur, non-executive director and investor, who helps organisations align their tech, teams and business strategy tells IT Pro: “[You should] make sure your employees have everything they need. Regulations may differ depending on the territory your employees work in, but at the very minimum, provide them with good laptops, good monitors and a good VPN in case they need to work with internal networks.”

Employers have some very clear legal responsibilities around all this. Take data security such as that required around GDPR for example, where there are legal requirements around managing personal information. Employers can expense their responsibilities around such areas. Christian Brundell, associate in the regulatory team at law firm Walker Morris explains: “To the extent an organisation incurs costs in connection with data security, those costs will be part and parcel of the business operating expenses and will generally be viewed by regulators as a burden that coexists in tandem with the benefit derived from the commercial activity. Accordingly, the employer will generally be expected to address any costs that arise in this respect.”

In practice this would mean employee support is likely to involve the provision of a secure access portal to employees (typically through use of a VPN), but wouldn’t amount to an obligation to contribute to employee home connectivity costs. Employers might offer to provide discretionary financial support, however.

Device security

When it comes to using personal tech for work, device security is more important than ever. How can a firm be sure that the data on a home worker’s device is truly secure? Tom Venables, practice director for application and cyber security, at risk management consultancy Turnkey Consulting, explains that “from a data protection point of view, employing organisations have to ensure that they’re doing everything in their power to protect sensitive information such as client, customer, and employee data”.

He adds: “Once data in on an uncontrolled device then many controls no longer apply and the chain of ownership is lost, with this risk increasing if the device is shared amongst other people within a household.”

For Venables, one of the responsibilities firms should take to ensure that devices remain secure is providing training on best practice and cybersecurity, and doing this regularly. Polo concurs, saying employers need to ensure robust security measures are in place – for example, by enforcing password rotation, encrypting hard drives, automatic laptop locking after a brief period of inactivity, using encrypted password managers and two-factor authentication, and creating access roles.

Going the extra mile

Getting things right in this respect isn’t only about securing tech and ensuring that workers are up to speed with best practice. It’s also about providing ‘softer’ support, which is arguably just as important as people using personal tech for work purposes, as employees deal with competing pressures around work/life balance, adjust to working in a home environment and maybe also try to manage home schooling.

The average workers is not a tech supremo, and as Brundell points out: “Since the majority of employees will not be best placed to assess the technical security capacity of an individual tool … or to appreciate its interaction with other business systems in play, the employer will generally want to ensure that only authorised technologies are used.”

Polo has some more advice, suggesting employers should “keep your door open in case any of your employees need some extra help … [and] try to facilitate any sort of financial aid if you are in a position to do so”.

This level of flexibility seems highly appropriate at the current time. If firms are going to support workers who use personal tech for work purposes, then focusing on both the ‘hard’ areas of legal requirements and secure access and the ‘softer’ areas of providing additional support – including financial help with broadband connections and equipment – seems to strike the right note.

Staying motivated at work isn't easy – now more than ever. Indeed, surveys suggest a third of Brits don't feel motivated in their current role.

This is a problem exacerbated by looming threats of redundancies as the economy teeters on the brink and also isn't helped by a lack of support from colleagues and managers while working from home.

"Employee motivation is critical through any recession, but when you have a degree of lockdown on top, then the challenge is much greater," says Andy Davies, senior vice president at HR firm MHR.

Addressing that challenge isn't easy, requiring a personalised approach - after all, what motivates one employee may frustrate another. "No two employees are exactly the same and even in the toughest of business conditions, managers need to personalise their approach, building on their understanding of what motivates employees as individuals," Davies says.

Motivating a team is the prime responsibility of a leader, according to Jake Third, managing director at Hallam, who also stresses how important it is to know what really matters to your colleagues.

"Once you understand what they want, find that sweet spot where the organisation's goals and their personal goals overlap," he says.

"If their own personal ambitions are in alignment with the company's objectives, they will naturally want to win for the company."

While a personal touch is key to finding out what motivates specific employees, good managers can also lead from the top.

"I make motivation the core of my message in all settings and remind my teams through personal stories that we are all in the same situation," says Brandon Bekker, senior vice president of cyber security firm Mimecast.

"I like to talk about what our legacy will be and what we will do now so we’re proud to tell our grandkids about it."

Get talking

Communication is core to understanding what motivates staff, and though we may be working remotely, at least we have the tools to keep in touch.

Dean Shillingford, head of people and culture at Bitstocks, says his company uses Monday and Slack to coordinate projects, but also Slack and Google Hangouts for social meetups, including a film club, quiz, and Friday morning workout.

"These tools don’t take the place of talking via video chats, with all heads of departments being reminded of the importance of listening to their team members and keeping in touch with them on a personal level, as well as about work-related matters," he adds.

Socialising can help, agrees Nikki Thorpe, people operations manager at Planday. “Social teams are special teams and if your business is used to getting together after work for a drink, that shouldn’t change if you’re in self-isolation," she says.

"Get everyone together via video conference and bring a drink of choice and have a chat and a laugh as you normally would."

More than money

What motivates employees? Research suggests a few common threads - and money, benefits, flexible working, the chance of promotion, and recognition are all well proven motivators.

Research sponsored by SMELoans shows half of Brits see salary as their biggest motivator, followed by flexible working, having a boss they enjoy working with, and a short commute.

But there could be more to it.

To read the rest of this feature, which was originally published by sister title The Business Briefing, please download the original in its PDF form.

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Security researchers have exposed a new phishing campaign that uses COVID-19 vaccine news to spread malware, phishing, and Business Email Compromise attacks (BEC).

The attacks target individuals within businesses by impersonating organizations, including the WHO, DHL, and vaccine manufacturers. The themes leveraged a range of topics, including the fear that a person had encountered an infected individual; government vaccine approvals and economic recovery fueled by the vaccine; and sign-up forms to receive the vaccine, information updates, and vaccine shipment delivery.

According to a Proofpoint blog post, the BEC attack campaigns were far more targeted. They reportedly gave information on a bogus merger/acquisition and were sent directly to senior executives in the affected organizations.

Researchers first noted the attacks in early December 2019. These emails projected that COVID-19 vaccines would fuel the world's economic recovery. The email claimed to be from an executive asking the recipient for their cooperation in a foreign company’s confidential acquisition. It alleged that this is an opportune moment to acquire, as in the "midst of every crisis lies a great opportunity."

This month, hackers sent hundreds of messages over four days that targeted dozens of industries in the US and Canada. The emails urged the potential victims to click a link to "confirm their email to receive the vaccine.” The goal of this phishing campaign was to steal Microsoft 365 login credentials.

“This campaign was notable because it capitalized on the recent government approval of vaccines and the rush to receive it. Specifically, the email talks about "Government approval of the COVID-19 vaccine" and provides a link where one can supposedly register to receive it. At the time of this campaign, the vaccine in the United States was still available to first responders and doctors on the front lines,” said researchers.

On January 11, researchers observed another small (under 100 emails) BEC email campaign targeting various US industries. This email only briefly mentions the COVID-19 vaccine but adds urgency - a common BEC technique - to the follow-up request: "Please give me your personal number."

“This attempt to increase the stress by giving the recipient less time to think about their response and allowing the attacker to pivot outside of a protected ecosystem,” said researchers.

Two other campaigns abused the World Health Organization logo and name to spread trojans and keyloggers and the DHL brand to steal email login credentials. Both used news on COVID-19 vaccines to lure victims into clicking on malicious links.

Coronavirus vaccination websites are buckling under intense volumes as citizens try to register for appointments. Some local health authorities are even turning to event registration site Eventbrite to cope with the demand, leading hackers to create spoof registration pages.

Most reports are emerging from several Florida counties. According to the Sun-Sentinel, Broward County’s vaccination website kept going offline over the weekend, forcing officials to notify people of its status via Twitter.

Hillsborough County’s website also crashed on Monday, the first day of vaccinations, as officials warned of more delays to come.

Pinellas County's vaccination site failed as seniors tried to register for shots. "At this time, we are suspending registrations by both phone and online. Updates will be coming," public health officials tweeted, drawing anger from citizens.

Counties have partnered with event registration company Eventbrite to handle registrations in some areas, but that also caused issues. The Tampa Bay Times warned of fake Eventbrite sites that charged for vaccinations then sent Pasco County seniors to vaccination stations without appointments. Pasco officials tweeted a warning about the scam.

Although most reports center on Florida, there have been isolated issues in other areas, too. In Texas, Harris County Public Health had to take down its vaccination website after allowing non-qualifying residents to sign up for the vaccine by mistake.

In some cases, even employee vaccination-registration sites suffered outages. Massachusetts General Brigham health care system had to take its vaccination registration site offline last month after a surge in employee demand.

A lack of leadership from the federal government has left local governments putting together their own registration websites to handle the fastest vaccination rollout in history, sources at US Digital Response told the Washington Post. The nonprofit, which assists governments nationwide with tech support, has organized volunteers to help local governments cope with the load. It’s developed a COVID-19 vaccination template website to help public health agencies roll out information websites in just a few hours.

For almost a year now, many people who were more accustomed to working in formalised offices have been working from home, and both organisations and their workers have found benefits in the arrangement.

With many employees understandably reluctant to return to the old ways, a large number of employers have committed to supporting working from home in the medium and longer term, even once the coronavirus pandemic has subsided. This raises the question, however, of how firms can ensure their people’s skills are kept up to date when they’re not likely to be in physical contact for the foreseeable future.

Flexibility is key

For many workers there was a significant and very rapid upskilling programme as they had to start working from home with no warning. While there was some formal training provided, initially at least it was very much a case of peer-to-peer learning from colleagues and others through informal channels, during online meetings, and information sharing between people who’d perhaps never met in person.

People’s patience and willingness to share tips on how to use aspects of video conferencing applications in particular was very notable, from gentle reminders to unmute to step by step help with screen sharing.

There is no reason this informal method should not continue for some skills and learning support. Indeed, finding ways of replicating ‘water cooler moments’ or shoutouts to colleagues of “how do I…’ can help boost camaraderie and a feeling of being part of a team even when not all in the same physical location, as well as cater for informal upskilling.

Doing more, more often

Water cooler moments are one thing, but there are still advantages to providing formal group training, even if it has to be delivered via video conference. In fact, this may be easier than trying to get everyone together in person. William Ip, associate at mid-market private equity firm ECI Partners, explains “In the virtual world, it’s far easier to get entire teams together to do group training sessions as people no longer have to travel between meetings, or have experts travel in to run workshops.” This makes it much easier to deliver formalised training on a regular basis – and reduces the expense for the employer too.”

This offers a strong argument for doing more training, more often while teams are working remotely – not just in terms of teaching new skills, but also refreshers on existing competencies and providing training in areas that might not have been seen as core considerations previously. Mental health awareness training, helping people ensure they have a strong work/life balance and other areas could be taken on as part of the everyday responsibility of employers, for example.

There are also areas that previously may not have been considered training because they were delivered informally in the office, but need to be carefully considered and actively pursued in a mass remote working environment. One such example is compliance checks and security awareness training. As Amanda Finch, CEO of not for profit industry body the Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISec), explains: “The days of face-to-face group briefings or even posters on notice boards to raise awareness are long passed.” It is up to firms to think through how they will handle this kind of training.

Building a loyal workforce

Delivering the right training in an appropriate way is crucial at the current time. The lockdown will have caused some to consider their current career path and, Finch tells us, firms should “identify what interpersonal and business skills will help individuals grow, alongside the purely technical skills they might need to do their current job”. She adds: “By building a framework that supports an employee’s career, instead of just what the business needs right now, organisations will be rewarded with a more loyal, more capable workforce.”

Important to taking this approach is being sure that people know that support is out there for them, and this goes for all aspects of HR and all levels of support. Where training and upskilling is concerned Ip stresses that firms have to try harder to ‘sell’ training with a remote workforce, saying: “It’s important to overcommunicate to staff that they can still get access to training, even when working remotely. Holding regular catch ups with employees, particularly those who are more junior to the business, to discuss their training and development will ensure that no development needs slip through the gaps.”

As we settle into a new era of work, a loyal, skilled workforce will be more important than ever. Taking a measured and flexible approach to training can help upskill employees and ensure they feel really connected to – and committed to – their employer.

The internet has been one of the most revolutionary technologies of our age, and most agree that the transformation it’s brought to our society has been beneficial. Social media – one of the more recent arrivals on the scene – has also generally been a good thing, allowing us to connect with friends and family across the world, find people who have similar interests to us, and rapidly share jokes, memes and information.

This latter element, however, has slowly turned from a benefit into a problem. Disinformation and what might be termed “fake news” is seeping in everywhere, making it difficult to know what and who to believe.

In this week’s episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we speak to Andy Patel, a researcher with cyber security firm F-Secure, about what disinformation is, how it spreads and the negative effects it could have on businesses.

Footnotes

• QAnon: What is it and where did it come from?
• FBI warns of hackers spoofing its domain
• Dems ask Facebook, Google and Twitter for coronavirus disinformation reports
• WhatsApp restricts message forwarding to curb spread of 5G myths
• What is phishing?
• IT Pro Live: Fighting terrorism with technology
• Fake news 'is killing our minds', says Tim Cook
• Trend Micro's free web-based tool takes on hackers and fake news
• WhatsApp counters fake viral messages with new fact-check tool
• Satirical websites target Mark Zuckerberg with fake news
• Trump confirms US cyber attack on Russia election trolls
• What is hacktivism?
• The IT Pro Podcast: What COVID-19 can teach us about open data
• Biden team signals president-elect may target Section 230 and data privacy
• Dems ask Facebook, Google and Twitter for coronavirus disinformation reports
• Google turns its hand to fighting election abuse
• Facebook facing scrutiny amid claims it encourages spread of misinformation
• The IT Pro Podcast: The truth about 5G

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The coronavirus pandemic has led to huge business transformations, which have proven a challenge to some organisations and a boon to others. One beneficiary has definitely been the cloud industry, which has seen huge growth over 2020 and beyond.

Cloud services have been a major driver of the mass shift to remote working that enabled many businesses to minimise the disruption caused by the closure of offices. So, while the economic downturn has affected many industries, cloud service providers have performed relatively well thanks to the increased demand for their products.

Companies will understandably be reluctant to claim that they have profited from the terrible impact of COVID, but some have experienced a huge boost in demand. Zoom and Microsoft Teams were among those that have had a surge in usage and revenue, with the latter reporting that it had surpassed 44 million users as early as March 2020. Many businesses have taken the opportunity to accelerate digital transformation projects over this period, with engineers more than capable of carrying out projects at pace and scale – even across the traditionally lethargic public sector.

But as these successes have been driven by COVID, the industry will sooner or later have to address what the future holds once their services are no longer in such high demand.

Shifting sands

While we all rejoiced at the news that a potential COVID-19 vaccine would be available for distribution before the end of 2020, shares in a handful of companies dropped sharply in response, including a 15% reduction in the valuation of Zoom.

Whether things go back to the way they were, or cloud companies continue to play a more pivotal role than ever, is yet to be determined. For independent cloud consultant Danielle Royston, the goal of going ‘back to normality’ in 2021 is misplaced.

“There’s no point wasting time and energy trying to return to the halcyon days of pre-COVID,” she says. “Let’s focus instead on some of the positive ‘disruptions’ we’ve seen [in 2020]. In all the companies I’ve been at, I’ve promoted – and in some cases fully converted to – remote working. I saw this as the inevitable direction that work and society was going, as the cloud computing tools were already there. And it makes sense: A better quality of life for employees, ease of collaboration, cutting the costs of business travel.”

This is a trend that Tom Wrenn, cloud investment expert and partner at private equity firm ECI Partners, predicts will continue well into 2021, telling IT Pro that COVID-19 forced many companies into rapidly adopting cloud-based operations. These, driven by government-enforced lockdowns, allowed them to continue operating remotely. “Now, having done a basic shift to cloud-based systems,” he adds, “2021 will be the year of full cloud adoption, with businesses starting to optimise all its benefits; for example, data analytics and AI. If rapid investment was needed in 2020, this year businesses will want to see a return on that investment and will expect to see more from their cloud computing providers.”

Remoting-in

Although the recent transition to remote working is a trend sparked by COVID-19, the consensus is that it’s the beginning of a wider cultural shift. Former IBM boss Ginni Rometty is among the latest to suggest as much, claiming mass remote working will continue in some form as part of a broader hybrid model in future. This may involve companies keeping some physical presence while establishing the infrastructure and equipment to allow workers to work remotely as and when desired.

Cisco CTO for UK and Ireland, Chintan Patel, agrees, telling IT Pro that remote working gained widespread acceptance during COVID-19, even in organisations where it was unthinkable before. This means cloud and software as a service (SaaS) tools will continue to remain a crucial part of many setups, even though businesses will mostly return to a form of ‘hybrid’ model. “For remote working, cloud plays a central role; think secure cloud-based collaboration, accessing cloud-based business applications, and extending the security perimeter to thousands of devices,” he explains. “It’s important to note, though, that cloud-based consumption models are not limited to remote working only. As to those returning to the offices, we see technology can help make the workplace more secure and efficient. As and when companies prepare for a return to office, they also need to optimise their space, address worker concerns about sanitation and social distancing and plan how to communicate policies and information clearly.”

Technology will play a major part in instigating the changes needed in future, with a key role to play for many of the firms that have enjoyed success during the pandemic. While demand for software such as video conferencing platforms may not be as sky-high as it was at the beginning of the pandemic, Wrenn argues the next big step is how cloud companies can eat further into the market share enjoyed by the traditional telephone industry. “More and more businesses are using Microsoft Teams or Zoom to interact,” he explains, “when previously they would have used conference lines or even called a person directly due to it being more convenient. Cloud providers need to think about how they can make the most of this opportunity as the way in which people interact changes.”

To infinity and beyond

To some extent, we should all consider ourselves lucky the global pandemic happened when it did, given that cloud computing has only in recent recently become as advanced as it is now. Thus, rather than ‘profiting from the pandemic’, this period has been the making of the industry. After all, “cloud storage, processing, and compute facilities are already set up, and ready to expand easily and automatically, as and when enterprises need,” according to Royston, who claims this wouldn’t have been the case ten to 15 years go. “It would’ve been an epic failure and caused even more disruption and long-term damage to global economies. This year, white-collar workers being able to quickly adapt to working from home in their millions is part of what’s helped many sectors stay afloat. And it’s because of the investment and ongoing work of hyperscalers over the past few years that’s meant businesses can support workers in doing this.”

Connectivity, too, will continue to grow as organisations’ reliance SaaS tools increases too, Patel adds, with firms expecting more from these companies beyond provision. With cloud infrastructures becoming increasingly diverse, especially with applications adding more layers of complexity, businesses will be looking to strengthen their infrastructure. This will be achieved by gaining deeper visibility across their IT estates, ensuring workloads have continuous access to required resources and running systems that connect and protect at scale - from on-prem to hybrid cloud configurations. This is in addition to using technologies such as machine learning to give customers tools to manage their ever-growing data lakes. This is where providers can step in to guide customers on their migration journeys.

As such, the greatest challenge facing cloud providers, in light of the above, will largely be customer retention, according to Tom Wrenn. “If we take online meeting services as an example, historically businesses would have had to invest in a service, such as [Cisco] WebEx, which is often costly and comes with a lot of equipment,” he says. “Today, however, businesses are using Zoom and Teams for this and can just turn services on and off with little upfront investment. This means that customers aren’t locked into providers in a way they once were. As a result, cloud computing providers will need to over-deliver for their clients, retaining a high level of customer service as well as ensuring that service levels don’t decline as they undergo a huge period of growth.”

The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on all of us, but one of the most drastic changes has been to business IT. Digital transformation and remote collaboration have been catapulted to the top of CIOs’ priority list, and companies have found themselves supporting scores of remote workers.

But with a vaccine tantalisingly close to rollout, how will these trends evolve once it’s safe to go back to the office? Joining us this week to discuss the potential long-term impact of COVID on the UK’s cloud market is Frank Jennings, commercial & cloud Lawyer at Wallace LLP.

Footnotes

• Post COVID-19: The end of the office as we know it?
• Navigating the public cloud
• Alibaba's cloud growth outpaces AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud
• Cloud infrastructure spending surges 33% in Q3
• What is a managed IT service?
• How the enterprise can embrace hybrid cloud
• Five minutes with… Adam Gerrard, Yodel CDO
• What are the risks of cloud adoption?
• Five reasons why digital transformation is essential for business growth
• Digital transformation? Don’t bother unless you plan to address risk
• Brexit could cost UK firms £1.6bn if data-sharing agreement isn’t reached
• European court invalidates primary EU-US data transfer mechanism
• What is GDPR? Everything you need to know, from requirements to fines
• Now is the time to embrace remote working
• Microsoft overhauls its privacy policy amid EU concerns
• Managing cloud lifecycles
• The road to recovery: Growing your business in China
• Why you need to include the cloud in your disaster recovery plan
• Channel Pro

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Our working lives were turned upside down in 2020 – in some cases, irrevocably. However, research shows that women are under additional stress during the pandemic, particularly within the confines of lockdown. A study this summer by King’s College London and Ipsos MORI suggests that women still bear the brunt of childcare duties during lockdown.

Women also reportedly feel more stress and anxiety than men during the lockdown, with US research indicating that the gender gap in mental health has widened significantly during the pandemic.

“Longer term, I think the mental health impact on women should not be ignored, particularly in those homes where women bear the brunt of the burden of home and school care,” Margaret Adam, AVP European tech ecosystems services, SMB/start-up and partnering ecosystems at IDC, tells IT Pro.

Women in the IT industry are no exception to this. “The IT industry is fast-moving and fast-changing, and this brings its own levels of stress, that combined with emotional and household care and duties can be overwhelming and, I believe, will take a toll,” she says.

How the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated underlying issues for women in business was one of the topics discussed at a recent women in technology event that coincided with the launch of Samsung Pioneers. This initiative, the company says, is a platform to champion women in tech and aims to bring together brands, industry and non-profits to share advice, guidance and advocate for change.

“In recent times, it’s been really challenging for us all. We know first-hand how we’re all struggling to meet this new normal,” professor Sally Eaves, senior policy advisor at Forbes Technology Council, said at the event.

Tess Smillie, VP of people at Samsung UK, Ireland & Europe HQ, said it was important for women to seek out others for support and offer their support in return. “There is so much value and power in shared experiences and learning through others. It can be as basic as having someone to talk with or to listen,” she said.

Existing and potential challenges facing women

The impact of COVID-19 on women in tech is unavoidably linked to discussion of progress made in gender equality, how to tackle unconscious bias, and the existing and potential challenges facing women in the industry.

When asked to share advice to help empower women within the tech industry, Jacqueline De Rojas, president of TechUK, noted that the greatest threat to diversity is “the belief that someone else will fix it”.

“It is therefore incumbent upon us to play our part – the smallest of actions, kindness and encouragement or piece of advice from those who’ve ‘gone before’ can make the biggest of differences,” she said.

“Collaborate with other women in tech, aim to become a job creator rather than a job seeker, mentor the next generation when you can and get involved in your local community to give insight on how accessible the world of tech can be,” added Hadeel Ayoub, founder and CTO of assistive technology company, BrightSign.

IDC’s Adam tells IT Pro it's important to be transparent about the challenges women are facing during the pandemic. “Try not to do it all, but to experiment with ways of working that enable you to stay on top of both home, family and work commitments,” she says.

“This is a chance for the industry to reset expectations on what is feasible. It’s likely that many companies will have headcount freezes and, in some cases, redundancies so the workload is likely to increase. It’s vital to try to find a way of working that doesn’t lead to burnout.”

Technology is part of the solution

On the flip side, one of the biggest takeaways from the event was that technology is also part of the solution, in that it allows both a remote and flexible approach to working.

“Women have been shouting about about flexible working for decades,” said Tanya Weller, director of Samsung Showcase, KX, at Samsung Electronics. “The pandemic has forced those small and medium businesses that perhaps have struggled – whether it’s been a trust issue or a technology setup issue – [to say] ‘we have to do this, there’s no other option’.”

Ultimately, said De Rojas, women need to champion and support one another in the current crisis, and into the future – and technology will continue to play a part in that.

“We’ve done a great job of embracing technology, and it has been fabulous for social connection. And I certainly have really leant on the sisterhood in tech when I just needed to reach out and have a chat. Or just things that you would normally have done with a human have been certainly enabled by technology. I would say that I’m a tech optimist, but frankly, I don’t know how we would have got through the pandemic without it.”

Tips for everyone to avoid burnout

• Prioritise your mental health and try to carve out time for self-care
• With video conferencing, calls can now be recorded. Instead of trying to attend every call, ask if you can listen back if required
• Try to keep some distance between work and home life, even if it’s as simple as short walk or run before or after work
• Keep calls to shorter durations, blocking time in calendar for work or personal time
• Be disciplined about the hours of work to ensure resiliency in the ‘next normal’ of work

The UK government’s COVID-19 contact-tracing app was patched last week to fix a bug that meant the system failed to send notifications to thousands of users who should have been warned to self-isolate.

The Test and Trace app, which is supposed to be a core part of the government’s national coronavirus response, hasn’t been working properly since its late September launch because it was set to the wrong sensitivity.

Users whose “risk score” should have triggered an alert, due to possible exposure among their contacts, were not alerted to either get a test or self-isolate due to the error, according to the Times.

As a result, “shockingly low” numbers of users had been sent warnings since the app was released, according to a government source, with Android users among those more likely not to have been sent a notification when they were supposed to.

An update to the app, released last week, fixed both this error, as well as another bug in which users were notified about a “potential exposure” only for the message to disappear without a trace, and without any further details.

The risk threshold is calculated for each user and for each possible COVID-19 exposure using various factors including distance, as well as the infectiousness of the person who has tested positive. The system then works out the overall risk to each applicable individual, and sends out a notification if it exceeds the threshold.

This threshold was due to be lowered when the app launched from 900 to 180, although this didn’t happen until the patch was launched last week. This is according to a blog written by the head of product for the NHS COVID-19 app Randeep Sidhu and the director of product for Test and Trace, Gaby Appleton. Due to a new statistical algorithm in use by the app, the risk threshold is being lowered to 120.

Although 19 million people now use the app, officials have refused to reveal how many people have been told to self-isolate, the Times report added.

The NHS app has suffered a disastrous and long-drawn-out launch, having first been promised in April 2020 and delayed several times due to various concerns, including potential security risks as well as compatibility issues.

The original idea was to pursue the decentralised Google and Apple API, which the majority of national COVID-19 contact tracing apps are powered by. The government then ditched this in favour of developing its own centralised app, although ran into issues when it was trialled on the Isle of Wight and was eventually abandoned in favour of a manual national contact tracing scheme.

The government then pivoted back to using the Google and Apple API to power its contact-tracing smartphone app, which eventually launched on 24 September. Its release was far from the smoothest, however, with fears initially that it would not be compatible with a large swathe of iOS devices.

A fix was also needed two days after launch when it was revealed that tens of thousands of NHS tests were not compatible with the app’s current build version,

This article originally appeared in Issue 9 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

Touchscreens have become ubiquitous in everyday life. Not only are they the gateway to our much loved mobile phones but, until recently, we have been happy to regularly interact with them at everything from ATMs and ticket machines to interactive kiosks and supermarket checkouts.

And then COVID-19 struck.

The pandemic has undoubtedly changed the ease with which we touch shared screens – especially once scientists found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can last on surfaces for up to three days. In fact, an UltraLeap survey of the UK and US public in May this year found that 80% of consumers think touchscreens are unhygienic and 50% would be unlikely to use them in the future.

“Consumers around the world are worried about the safety and cleanliness of public touchscreens, such as self-service kiosks, and would be very open to trying new ways of interacting if they are available,” explains Catherine Morgan, director of Ocean Labs, a technology division of digital out of home firm Ocean Outdoor. “The rapid adoption of contactless payments is one proof point.”

With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that interest is growing in touchless interfaces.

“COVID​-19 has placed the topic of health and wellbeing under a global spotlight,” says Lee Skrypchuk, human machine interface technical specialist at Jaguar Land Rover. “Prior to this, technologies that ​could help to mitigate the spread of bacteria and viruses were a developing trend, but now it seems to be in sharp focus to the point where ​the perception of shared touch devices may change forever. Customers will consider these ​types of risks more intently in the future and ​are likely to expect devices, ​which are of a shared use nature, ​to be designed to mitigate any risks that might be created by touch surfaces which are potentially shared by many different people.”

Changing the game

Until recently, interest in touchless technology had been low as what’s on offer has generally been expensive, power hungry, bulky, and not very intuitive.

“Most touchless solutions capitalise on recent advances in sensing and data processing technologies,” explains Bashar Ahmad, a senior research associate in the department of engineering at University of Cambridge. “One example is gesture-recognition-based systems, where the user undertakes a pre-learnt mid-air symbolic gesture such as swipe or wave and the interface produces a particular response linked to this gesture. These types of systems have generally been quite clunky.”

New developments in touchless solutions promise something better, however. Ocean Outdoor, for example, has integrated touchless technologies across its portfolio in partnership with US haptics firm UltraLeap.

“UltraLeap has developed incredibly accurate hand tracking, as well as the world’s only mid-air haptics, which creates the sense of touch in mid-air using ultrasound,” explains Morgan. “The hand tracking technology uses an inexpensive infrared stereo camera, which means we can create a very cheap and effective touchless solution that can replace touchscreens.”

Meanwhile, Skrypchuk and Ahmad, along with their colleagues at the University of Cambridge and Jaguar Land Rover, have developed a no-touch touchscreen called ‘predictive touch’, which uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and widely available sensor technology (such as hand/finger tracking) to predict a user’s intended target on touchscreens and other interactive displays or control panels, selecting the correct item before the user’s hand reaches the display.

“Our innovation is completely unique because it has the ability to predict the interface item the user intends to select from their freehand pointing movement, eye-gaze behaviour and other contextual information such as environment, user profile, interface design and historical data such as frequency of use,” says Ahmad. “It still uses the intuitive point-select hand/finger motion everyone is familiar with, except that the user needs not touch the display.”

Skrypchuk explains further: “Many similar technologies track the hand like a mouse cursor, mapping the movements to tile locations on a screen. With predictive touch, we are inferring intent through the path, speed and other motion characteristics of the pointing finger. The idea being that as your finger approaches the screen, we can make an increasingly accurate prediction the closer the finger gets to the screen, based on its trajectory. As we track finger or hand position, it gets to the point where the prediction is high enough that we can be certain of the selection, dependent upon the number of items of the screen and the distance of the finger from the screen surface. Therefore, you can continue to use the touchscreen as you would do ordinarily, we just make the selection sooner.”

COVID-proof contact

This is just the start of what the technology can achieve. As lockdown restrictions around the world continue to ease, Skrypchuk and Ahmad believe the technology will be incredibly useful in a post-COVID world. “The system doesn't have to be screen based either, it can work on any given surface or target and we ​could convert any screen (including non-touch enabled ones) into a touchscreen,” Skrypchuk says. “Imagine how many non-touch computer monitors there are in the world – we could potentially convert these to touchless operation just by adding a single camera.

Looking ahead, Ahmad expects touchless interaction technology to gradually replace touch-screens. “This will be accelerated by the proliferation of emerging new display technologies for 3D interfaces or holograms,” he explains.

Morgan agrees: “We expect to see more powerful integration of new technology into next-generation systems, making them future-proof against COVID-19 and any future pandemics,” she says. “The type of touchless system used will vary, depending on the scenario – but what’s clear to me is that the future of touchscreens is most definitely touchless.”

Data is a vital commodity in modern business, but there’s a growing movement based on openly sharing it for mutual benefit. This trend has neatly intersected with the ongoing coronavirus crisis, in the form of the track and trace efforts which are being used to measure and limit the spread of the virus - but how exactly is open data being used to fight the pandemic, and what lessons can we learn about the use of open data in a business setting?

In this week’s episode, we’re joined by Amanda Brock, CEO of industry body Open UK, to find out more about how open data is contributing to relief efforts, the pitfalls of poorly-planned strategies, and how organisations can collaborate on data initiatives.

Footnotes

• European Commission's new president pledges action on AI
• What is big data analytics?
• What is big data?
• The IT Pro Podcast: Data-driven doggos
• Why transparency is key to promoting trust in artificial intelligence
• What is open source?
• UK gov faces legal action over Test and Trace data retention
• NHS Test and Trace IT blunder blamed on Microsoft Excel glitch
• UK gov abandons contact-tracing app in favour of Apple-Google API
• The IT Pro Podcast: Tech's coronavirus triumphs and tribulations
• The GSMA’s impractical ideas for contact-tracing reveal the scale of the challenge
• IT Pro Live: It's open under the cloud
• IT Pro Live: How Pro Football Focus became the NFL's secret weapon
• OpenUK
• Data: A resource much too valuable to leave unprotected

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