Our Take: Post COVID –19 Reality For The Workplace

How Has COVID-19 Impacted Our Technology Environments?

In our assessment, COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst for many technology trends that were already influencing technology leaders across industries.

Remote working, collaboration and emerging technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence and touchless engagements are themes that gained traction in 2020. We see the adoption of these technologies continuing into 2021

Implications Within The New Workplace

The workplace (and in many cases the marketplace) is officially virtual. Users need to be increasingly proficient with digital platforms and interfaces in order to remain effective and relevant.

Organizations must invest more time in ensuring their users are suitably trained and enabled, from the perspective of functionality, as well as to promote working securely while away from the office. In addition, this introduces a new element of ensuring staff wellness is catered for while telecommuting.

Human Factors To Consider

During the past year, we have observed the significant emotional toll that working remotely has taken on users. Many users have spent the better part of 2020 in back-to-back virtual meetings, with limited in-person engagements; often in isolation from colleagues, family members and other support groups. This has had a negative consequence on overall well-being, and ultimately, efficiency as decision fatigue settles in.

Most organizations have a long way to go to ensure users are as safe and efficient as possible, while protecting their personal time, and promoting a holistic approach to working from home.

Copy Cat Group - Here To Support Your Business

Since the onset of the pandemic, we have been working with our customers to ensure users and customers can access critical systems, applications and services remotely, without sacrificing uptime, security or usability.

During this process, we have honed our practical knowledge and expertise to guide our customers to create future-ready technology environments that reduce friction and incorporate a holistic approach to wellness. Here are 2 main challenges we’ve successfully overcome for our clients during this period:

1. Secure Remote Working

Client: 2 major banks within the Kenyan financial sector. Some of our customers were traditionally accustomed to working from the office; Covid-19 disrupted that tradition. Being their first time to embrace remote working, they had 2 key concerns:

a) How to secure the communication channels used in remote working.

b) How to monitor productivity.

Copy Cat Solution Being a leading systems integrator and well-versed with technology, we proposed a secure remote access solution integrated with identity awareness and network access control to provide a hybrid Zero Trust Network (ZTN) solution. This was attained using Cisco ISE network access control solution, Cisco Anyconnect Endpoint client for remote access VPN solution & endpoint security posture assessment and Microsoft Active Directory as an identity source. This solution enabled our customer to have secure remote access from anywhere on any device with productivity reports generated every end of day to determine when and for how long employees were connected securely to the centralised applications and systems.

2. Collaboration

Clients: Prominent NGO and a major bank in Kenya. Our customers were looking for ways of simulating the office scenario, day to day collaboration between different teams albeit in a safe and virtual way. Some of the features they were looking for were:

1. Ability for participants to share presentations with a seamless voice, video and group chat experience.

2. Remote desktop assistance.

3. Recording of sessions held by participants, whether virtual meetings or trainings.

All within the shortest time possible since the pandemic didn’t give users sufficient time to prepare for remote working. Copy Cat Solution Knowing how long it typically takes to procure and on-board a complete suite of on-prem collaboration solution, Copy Cat alongside its technology partners provided an easy to set up solution leveraging on cloud capabilities. This was in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration tools (Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams). Within a matter of hours, we managed to set up our clients for remote collaboration. With this, they were able to continue working from home in the same manner they would in the office. This ensured employee safety was upheld whilst getting them to work together and bring value to their respective organizations during the lockdown. Let’s explore how to future-proof your technology environment today. Here’s your chance to empower your users to be more engaged and effective than ever before.