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2020 was the year video conferencing platforms truly came into their own. By no means a new concept prior to the pandemic, their popularity was certainly fast-tracked due to nothing more than necessity. Ever since Lockdown 1.0, new solutions and old have gone head-to-head in the bid to become the preferred virtual meeting platform, with Zoom and Microsoft Teams at the forefront.

It goes without saying that the events of 2020 have irrevocably changed the face of the digital landscape forever. The unexpected arrival of COVID-19 has challenged businesses to think differently, not only about their IT, but how they fundamentally operate and communicate on a day-to-day basis.

There’s no doubt about it – the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting lockdown restrictions has had a fundamental and potentially long-lasting impact on businesses all over the globe. While the shift to remote working was already seeing considerable uptake prior to the arrival of the virus, this trend has very suddenly and unexpectedly become a necessity.

Even before the world was pushed towards remote working, the perimeter of your network was expanding. A flood of mobile devices, the accessibility of cloud applications, and burgeoning flexible working practices had seen your users begin to move outside of your traditional network.

Although the pandemic continues to persist, the government is now strongly encouraging a cautious return to work for UK businesses. Six months have passed since lockdown was enforced, during which time many organisations have had to adapt quickly to a world of remote working and rethink their approach to business operations. Now, the move back to the office is presenting a whole new wave of different challenges. 

In recent months, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented businesses with a number of challenges. Throughout this period, we’ve found that those who have been able to action a comprehensive and well thought out continuity plan have fared best. Having the appropriate processes and technology in place has enabled them to act decisively and preserve business performance while minimising the impact of any upheaval.

On April 21st of this year, Microsoft made the big decision to turn its beloved brand Office 365 into Microsoft 365. This name change accompanies a recent shift in user behaviour, which has seen Microsoft’s collaboration services grow in popularity as digital and remote working increasingly becomes the norm. Where the original Office 365 suite was loved for email and the usual productivity apps, now services like Teams and tools for mobility and security are the reason businesses are looking to Microsoft to stay productive and connected.

The unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic has caught a lot of businesses off-guard. If managing your organisation’s IT estate was difficult before the outbreak, it’s certainly become a lot more complicated since. Undoubtably, the change in circumstances has had a big impact on your critical infrastructure, especially if most of your workforce is now working from home and need remote access to the apps and data hosted in your data centre.

For decades, virtualisation has been the go-to method for organisations to streamline and consolidate their workloads. By decoupling apps and services from their hardware, going virtual saves businesses physical capacity, hours of orchestration time, and considerable CAPEX costs. But as is the case with all technology over time, this winning approach is now being challenged by fresh thinking.

The current contender for virtualisation’s long-running title is containerisation.

Basic data centre infrastructure design has followed the same basic recipe almost forever. Compute, storage, network and more recently the hypervisor are treated as discrete components to be individually managed, albeit with the same ends in mind.

However, a wave of new applications and a need for greater levels of performance has driven a need for a different approach, one which delivers better response times, more flexibility and freedom to scale quickly to better meet changing business demands.