Industry Wrap № 8.
And that’s a wrap! Next Dimension curates the most practical and useful tools and strategic IT insights from the web.
This week we shared articles across our social media covering the following topics: Enable Efficiency through Innovation, IT ROI, and Simplify Your Infrastructure.
Looking for details? Continue reading to see more.
Enable Efficiency through Innovation
Preparing you for the next normal. Simplifying your IT application layout makes hybrid workplaces more efficient.
With the year more than halfway done, we can all agree that many unexpected instances have occurred. Cisco has been working hard to make sure Webex was there to enable the connections we’ve all come to rely on. Cisco believes the future will be a blend of in-office and working-from-home, and they’ve created a blueprint to help you as we move into this future.
- Empower the remote worker – Enable remote workers with personalized and engaging experiences; help them raise their game, wherever their work happens.
- Safe return to the office – For employees heading back into the office, ensure a safe while still productive environment by providing touchless and intelligent experiences.
- Develop meaningful customer relationships – Continue to nurture your customer relationships and ensure that they can reach you anyway, any time.
- Make I.T. hum – Because IT is key to supporting the transition to this hybrid future, the right management and decision-making tools can make IT hum.
The next steps are preparing your workforce to be equally productive from wherever they are, being there for your customers when they need you most, and effectively managing this new collaboration experience.
IT ROI
Is your risk management strategy aligned with the business? or siloed?
Only four in 10 security leaders can answer the question, “how secure, or at risk, are we?” Business-aligned leaders are nearly five times more likely to collaborate with stakeholders on cost, performance and risk reductions than more reactive leaders. Business-aligned leaders are also seven times more likely to automate risk management objectives to vulnerability prioritization practices.
Traditional cybersecurity metrics are technical and are accommodating to non-technical stakeholders. The metrics boards look for, including financial risk, reputation damage, regulatory infringements, which are often forgotten by security teams. The board wants to know:
- How the digital infrastructure is defended
- If the people who are authorized to take risk are also able to mitigate it
- If all tools were used to their full capacity or if more is needed
To measure their ROI metrics, security leaders rely on mean time to detect, mean time to resolve and how many vulnerabilities were remediated monthly. When speaking with stakeholders, security leaders could use benchmarking to communicate the organization’s overall security performance relative to peers.
Simplify your Infrastructure
3 steps to improve infrastructure resiliency to protect operations from significant disruptions
Infrastructure and operations leaders specifically struggle to meet the increased demand for at-home infrastructure support, as the majority of citizens are teleworking indefinitely and globally.
Follow these three steps to limit the impact of COVID-19 on I&O and improve infrastructure resiliency to protect your organization from significant disruptions.
1. Establish a workforce resilience program
To maximize workforce productivity during pandemics, establish a workforce resilience program that includes some basic guidelines. For example, limit demand that remote work inevitably causes on the help desk by using an online, internal collaboration community for employees to share problems or ideas or enabling the use of public cloud desktop as a service (DaaS) for telecommuters.
2. Build an infrastructure response plan
- A shortlist of authorized personnel to remain on-site and ensure that critical infrastructure can still be accessed
- Automation of daily tasks like system health checks, performance monitoring and more. Augment staff and contractors were needed to perform routine tasks.
- Multiple points of contact at the operational support level to ensure that mission-critical IT services remain up and running. Have at least three workers assigned to each system.
3. Use scalable architecture to support business continuity
Organizations that can expect increased demand during a pandemic, like e-commerce vendors, must be able to scale up the capability to handle exponential workload increases in a relatively short time.
Taken together, these protective measures will have the additional benefit of aligning IT operations in traditional industries with those of internet-based organizations after the COVID-19 crisis is brought under control and the risk level drops.
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