COVID-19 has triggered a wave of changes throughout not only the globe, but the economy and businesses too. Companies and their workers are having to acquire new skills to function, let alone stay afloat during these uncertain times. The cloud has been a lifeline to business leaders across the board, allowing live agents to work from the safety of their own home. Now, we’re beginning to hear talk on recovery models for brands. Businesses are healing, but how do they claw back that competitive edge from pre-COVID times? Cisco has offered up several methods, and they’re all in their new whitepaper on Accelerating Digital Agility.
The company took data and insights from 23,000 CIOs and IT decision makers across 34 global markets and much of it circled back to one major aspect – agility. Here, CX Today takes a closer look.
A More Agile CX Offering
Agility transcends to speed, but pace with efficiency, and this is vital, Cisco says, not only during remote working times but should businesses choose the hybrid working model also. Businesses must transform their work infrastructure to obtain the all-important rapid response. This will, the company says, “reimagine their applications, secure data, and empower their teams”.
“This rapid response has now given way to focus on how we deliver the technology required for an inclusive recovery. We need to be able to both react to sudden changes, and also use technology to drive transformation. Digital agility will be essential, not just for our return to work but also for the new normal of hybrid work, digital collaboration, and a cloud-first operating model.”
Cisco says that to achieve this there are three key areas to focus on: accelerating our cloud transition with full-stack observability and cloud automation, connecting users with a network built for the cloud and hybrid work, and providing monitoring and assurance from user to application.
Better IT for Better Businesses
Cisco is working on a new hybrid working model. The date of the rollout is yet to be confirmed, but while the company is squirrelling away in the background preparing it, their whitepaper also flags current IT systems for the remote live agent.
“Working from home will no longer mean second-class IT service. Every user, everywhere, needs to enjoy one network, one policy, and one amazing experience. It is why we’ve focused so closely on delivering a secure, agile network architecture built for the cloud and hybrid work.”
Cisco’s SASE architecture does this perfectly. The solution works by moving network security to the cloud and natively connecting our SD-WAN fabrics to that gateway to provide an agile, secure networking experience.
Modern Infrastructure Systems
Cloud — and, especially, cloud-based applications — helps open a world of possibilities. Cisco’s whitepaper data reveals that for motions to cloud adoption in progress or planned for the future:
- 85% are leveraging at least one on premises solution
- 83%are leveraging at least one private cloud solution
- 83% are leveraging at least one multi-cloud and on premises solution
- 83% are leveraging at least one cloud-first and/or cloud native solution
Perhaps more importantly, among those figures 86% of participants believe it’s now vital to have a consistent operational model that goes across on premises, private cloud, public cloud and SaaS. This is particularly important as research shows that COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation on average three times faster compared with pre-pandemic years.
To summarise, it’s important to note that applications are becoming increasingly distributed, dynamic and complex, beyond the scale of human management, along with the environments upon which they rely. Security, networking and infrastructure must now evolve and businesses should take advantage of insights and automation to keep pace with the accelerating speed of application delivery.
