Reimagining businesses for the post-pandemic future

In 2020, the world witnessed one of the most sudden and unexpected global events in decades Besides putting brakes on global business and commerce, it also made human beings reimagine the fundamental way in which they go about their personal and official lives. Since people could not come in close contact with each other, businesses needed to identify and configure methods to leverage social distancing, while allowing their employees to stay in the safety of their homes. Business processes needed to be restructured and with new solution deployment to ensure seamless operations and to mitigate productivity loss.

While a large number of businesses have already embarked on this self-posed transformation journey, more needs to be done without much delay. The pandemic has taught businesses, that their IT needs to be flexible, accessible and seamless. 
Now, the challenge is to keep the lights on and prepare for a post-pandemic future. Foremost, businesses need to make up for the lost time, and secondly, they need to brace themselves for future disruptions. Both these challenges point towards the biggest industry buzzword of current times, and the biggest challenge global IT has seen in decades – Business Continuity.

Rethinking collaboration and networking with no-compromise security

Business Continuity encompasses the strategies employed by businesses to keep their day-to-day operations running while keeping their workforce securely and reliably connected. While this is the first step towards recovery, it is the stepping stone to innovation, disruption and becoming future-proof. If these three parameters are achieved successfully, it is then that a business becomes truly resilient. To achieve Business Continuity and pave the way for Business Resiliency, the IT needs to realign its investments, technology interventions and solutions, to become more workforce-centric. In the pre-pandemic days, IT was built around the workplace, the workforce assembled at the workplace, and it was fairly easy to manage IT and its processes. Today, the workplace has lost its much of its importance as the workforce is diversely spread across locations and time zones, putting a huge stress on IT security, accessibility and data management. This move of the power center from the workplace to the workforce is making CIOs reimagine the core for any business – collaboration. After the first hurdle of collaboration is mitigated, networking and security need to be restructured, to ensure an all-round transformation of IT for Business Continuity. For most organizations, such continuity technologies need to be implemented in consultation with industry experts. 

Cisco, a world leader in collaboration, security and networking solutions, offers a wide range of solutions for businesses of all sizes operating across industry verticals.

Assessing risk and creating transformative solutions

To help businesses embark on a continuity and resiliency journey, Cisco has charted out end-to-end processes with a focus on customer experience. The Business Critical Portfolio team of Cisco allows businesses to define a customer- centric strategy aimed at creating a resilient, adaptive, and transformative IT environment, with minimized risk and maximized ROI. This team also provides the much needed, analytics and insights required to reimagine existing IT and to transform it for accelerated continuity and consistent growth. With a step-by-step approach, Cisco assists businesses to enable a secure remote workforce, and a trusted workplace, before implementing technology aligned to reformed IT strategies. The final step is to support focussed engagements across the solutions' stack, to achieve an adaptive, virtual and collaborative culture. By assessing the risk factor, Cisco helps organizations transform their IT topology to align with new-age challenges, by using methodologies like DevOps and SecOps in conjunction with security and networking solutions. For specific industry verticals such as healthcare and education, Cisco also offers bespoke solutions for small businesses.

Comprehensive portfolio of solutions

For collaboration, Cisco offers the new and improved Webex along with virtual meetings and virtual contact center deployment solutions. To ensure secure remote work, solutions such as Enterprise VPN, Wireless LAN, DNA software and AMPs help businesses secure their workforce and ensure data security. With hybrid cloud and SD-WAN solutions, smaller businesses can leverage networking technologies with no-compromise security features. In short, Cisco provides an entire portfolio of solutions for businesses of all sizes to achieve Business Continuity and resiliency to transform their IT and collaboration ecosystem, securely without worrying about long-term CapEx investments. This allows businesses to innovate and grow in a post-pandemic world.