Remote Working, Cloud and Sustainability: A Look at What Lies Ahead for The Channel in 2021
Michael O’Hara
Managing Director
Michael has created a channel focused company that is passionate about helping our partners grow their business, through innovative sales, marketing and technical activities.
As I write this, the UK government has just approved the Pfizer and BioNtech’s Covid-19 vaccine which is really positive news and represents a very big step in the fight to rid us of this virus. Stock markets and businesses have reacted positively to the news of imminent vaccines from a number of different suppliers and this all bodes well for confidence returning to businesses and a willingness to invest in IT projects that were suspended during 2020. So how does that serve to shape things in the technology landscape over the coming year ahead?
Remote Working is Here to Stay
Many employees have been successfully and happily working from home and I see that continuing in a post Covid-19 world as well. Working from home (WFH) is here to stay however, I do think it will not be a case of working from home forever either. A report by Gartner in June 2021 predicts that almost one third of all employees worldwide will be remote workers by the end of 2021.
There will be a hybrid model of work from home for say, 2/3 days and then work from the office on the other days. As businesses plan their return to go back into the office in 2021, they will look at improving and securing their remote connections so I would expect strong growth in technologies in this area. With security being a much bigger consideration, we could see a move away from local firewalls, to a cloud-based Firewall-as-a-Service in order to protect a more widespread workforce. Technologies like SD WAN will see exponential growth next year. As Citrix Systems, a market leader in SD WAN says, “the Network is not a Local Network, it is a Wide Area Network now!”
Business Continuity
Business continuity will continue to be key next year, and I feel businesses will need to show agility in the “New Normal.” The global pandemic and associated economic shutdowns have served to teach us that businesses need the capacity to repel all sorts of challenging scenarios. Nobody could have expected this chain of events, and it’s forced small business owners to entirely rethink their approach to planning. They will need to operate with more “Cost Agility” than from a “Cost Reduction” viewpoint. The ability to move budgets that were earmarked for some capital expenditure may well have to be used for completely different and new business continuity projects. We saw this in 2020 where CapEx budgets were used to buy laptops instead to allow the workforce to work from home.
The Accelerated Move to The Cloud
The move to cloud has been greatly accelerated this year and is set to continue at a pace in 2021. Indeed, you could say that cloud will power how businesses end up conforming to the “New Normal”. Faced with more of the unknown, organisations will need to become more agile and responsive than ever before. I could see cost agility playing a part in 2021 where, for example, budgets set aside to pay for renewals, or on-premise solutions are used to assist businesses move to the cloud. This represents both a challenge and an opportunity for resellers in that they need to be closely following where the investments in technologies will be in 2021, and then offering appropriate solutions to their corporate customers.
Sustainability is Key!
Finally, I believe that sustainability will become more to the fore in 2021 and beyond, particularly so in a post-Covid world. I feel one of the lessons we all learnt during this pandemic is how fragile our ecosystem and the planet really is and that we all have a role to play in protecting the future for our families. With such insights from the likes of the well-respected David Attenborough revealing to a global audience what we can expect from continuing to trash our planet, through to the rise in ‘eco-friendly’ investing, technology would do well to take heed of the current sentiment. So, technologies that have a strong sustainability offering will do well in the coming years. Vendors like IGEL who are a leading provider of End User Computing solutions will do very well by offering products that are smaller in size and use less energy as well as software that will extend the life of businesses existing infrastructure.
As always, the New Year is bound to throw up new challenges, but new opportunities too. If 2020 has taught us one thing - and to coin a well-known saying - “the motto of the wises, be prepared for all surprises”.