Sooner or later the coronavirus crisis will end. Yet watching all transformations happening during the quarantine period, we can be sure that this world won’t ever be as it was before. Some things changed and changes will stay with us for the long haul. Let us think about what the world will be like in the post-COVID era – from a technology adoption standpoint specifically.

Everybody and Everything Shifts Online

Coronavirus taught us that people are the weak link, and critically weak in conditions of pandemic.

One sick worker is enough to stop the production on a plant
Offices may be closed by the authorities disposal
Physical business trips become impossible with closed borders

Some people lost their jobs, while others, on the contrary, had such an explosive expansion of their online stores they could hardly even handle. Our jobs, our education, business meetings…it’s all online now! No doubt, the internet became the most popular way of communication and buying goods and services.

This transition to digital, and digital services will not simply end when quarantine is over. COVID served as a catapult for long term technological change and the pace of adoption of technological solutions. For years, and from sources around the world, we’ve been told that the future of both work and study would be “remote,” that this would be the most common way; we just didn’t expect this new reality would approach us so quickly…and suddenly.

Cyber Security Takes Off

Many companies complain that cyber-security threats increased since the beginning of the pandemic. The number of hackers’ attacks during 2020 increased more than 400%. While countries suffered from health and economical issues, cyber-criminals seized the day and found loopholes for enterprise applications via unsecured personal devices. To improve their cyber resilience, many businesses re-examined their security systems and plan to spend additional costs on it through 2021.

“2021 will be the biggest year in cyber security innovation, services and spending in the history of the cyber security business,” shared our very own security expert, Mr. Dima Zodek, CEO of Gunbrig, which services as the cyber security pillar of DeepDive Technology Group.

New attacks create new protection methods and tools. One issue with security tools is that reactions to ongoing attacks often results in the purchase completely new instruments, not necessarily associated or connected with other cyber security tooling. Many interconnected tools may decrease the level of defense. No wonder we see a wave of interest in cloud services today. Cloud solutions tend to have fully integrated set of tools built into the most common technology stacks. The cloud was built to provide power, scalability, integration, and on-premises solutions simply, which provides benefit to enterprises from an integrated security standpoint. Cloud services also streamline the software supply chain, minimizing the risk of vulnerabilities posed by embedded tools.

Process Automation

Disruption caused by COVID-19 continues. Automation dismisses tasks that are manual and transforms the very way of doing them. While some fear the elimination of human jobs altogether, automation today is seen to make humans more efficient, move humans to higher-value tasks, and eliminate unnecessary jobs in place of alternative tasks. COVID-19 provides a push for automation to happen faster, and suddenly, where many companies of course were less-than-prepared for such drastic short-term change. Despite the mental and cultural challenges of change, automation brings undeniable benefits to companies of all shapes and sizes , such as cost-efficiency, productivity, predictability, reduced manual error, 24/7 workforce, and more. While not all forms of digital transformation projects pushed forward in 2020, projects particularly related to operations, process efficiency, and reducing expenses received extreme priority.

Cloud Services

While cloud services were already mentioned above, cloud spending has notably risen, and this tendency is not likely to change. It’s not surprising, aside from the security benefits, that “the cloud” provides the perfect tool for remote work, as it helps to both access and store all data remotely. Moreover, everybody can see changes when they are made, without waiting for delayed notification like emails. Access is secure and in real-time.

Another silver-lining of cloud services is that you do not need to be afraid of running out of power, or to pay more for the power you do not need. Cloud platform gives a possibility to receive additional power if and needed, which reduces costs when the load is low. For sure, it is very cost-optimizing. And we already talked about security, so no need to repeat.

Conclusions

The only method to stay afloat is to speed up the process of digital transformation. Constant experiments and innovations, being truly “agile,” proved to be crucial. Technologies are not just an item of expenditures; smart investments in technology saved many businesses from bankruptcy. Of course society will need some time for recovery. And unfortunately, COVID has not left us quite yet! Despite the fact that many companies are reducing costs for innovations, the best option is to accelerate the development of technology. Companies that develop solutions for affected industries also suffer losses, but this is more likely to affect reformatting due to the emergence of new priorities. Existing operating models proved to be obsolete, now the focus will be on more adaptive behavior. We need to see what can be changed now, so that next time we do not lose in similar situations. Take a look at technologies that can be useful, implement it, and, if necessary, find a reliable provider of such services.

There will be more changes than mentioned in this article, not only technologies change, but attitude to many things in our lives as well. We learned that being online is very important, that time is really valuable and we had it more than we thought, but spent it for such things as road to the office, offline meetings, etc. Now when we do many things online we have some spare time for things we didn’t do earlier.

This crisis revealed many weak points, so, let’s use it to become better, faster, and of course, smarter.