Telstra had published the results of a research study, ‘Business Continuity, Flexible Working and Adaptive Infrastructure: Five Actions for When the Economy Reopens Following COVID-19’. This gathered data from 120+ business leaders across Asia Pacific, Europe and the United States and was conducted together with GlobalData.
Key findings include:
Businesses are recalibrating their digital transformation strategy
93 percent of businesses state they have changed their IT priorities either incrementally, significantly, or dramatically. Businesses are updating their overall IT strategy, with the top priority for respondents across all regions to set up policies for their remote workforce. This includes areas such as ensuring employees can connect securely and access their applications and data.
Many pre-pandemic business continuity plans were not fit for purpose
Nearly one in ten enterprises did not have a business continuity plan pre-COVID-19. Of those organizations that did have a business continuity plan in place, almost a third (29 percent) did not have plans in place to respond to an unexpected global event such as a pandemic. In the United States, only 14 percent - the lowest among the regions - claimed to have a full business continuity plan, which included major events and pandemics, in place. The results point to the need for businesses to not only dramatically widen the scope of business continuity planning, but to also rely on more data tools to discover the hidden relationships between data sets, identify more vulnerabilities, and consider ways to generate a risk score on a more formal and regular basis.
Video conferencing and cloud-based contact center / centre solutions are some of the most transformative technologies to the enterprise
Video is the new voice in collaboration. 98 percent of respondents believe there will be an increased reliance on video conferencing to replace face-to-face meetings post-COVID-19 recovery.
Dustin Kehoe, Services Director from GlobalData shared, “It was interesting to see the overwhelmingly positive response for video conferencing. While the technology has always been available, we are seeing a generational shift in perception from pre-and post-COVID-19 eras.”
Organizations are reviewing their approach to customer engagement
Nearly half of respondents are now adopting a cloud-first contact center strategy for improving end-to-end capabilities for speed and agility when serving customers. The sentiment is the strongest in Northern Asia at 57 percent, followed by SEA and ANZ at 52 percent.
Networks will play a more important role in connecting remote and mobile workers
According to the survey results, eight out of ten businesses in the survey have a percentage of employees who ‘cannot work due to ICT challenges.’ One of the most immediate ICT priorities from the survey is supporting the remote workforce. The sentiment is especially strong from European, SEA and ANZ respondents. Post-COVID-19, networks will need to be software-defined, cloud-ready, more automated and flexible.
Outlook for the United States
The top business priorities for United States respondents are safeguarding the health and safety of employees (67 percent), increasing efforts to support their existing customers (60 percent), and enabling more remote work for employees (53 percent). US organizations are updating their business continuity plans to address the current and future pandemics as well as remote work policies for employees, including introducing or expanding cloud-first contact solutions to offer staff the ability to work remote. US organizations also see a strong need to increase the availability of online and digital services for their customers.
