October 28, 2020 - SnowMirror

There’s never a dull moment in the world of business as technological development continues to transform not just our personal lives, but also the way we work. Recent years have seen an upsurge in the adoption of cloud-computing and service-based delivery models. These, in turn, have given rise to a new era of workforce mobility and firmly established the foundations of a gig-based economy. The days of the 9 to 5 stuck in front of an office desk are fading away.

2019 was all about software-as-a-service (SaaS). By delivering web applications and compute power on demand, rather than relying on on-premises systems, people are now able to take their work with them no matter where they go. But now the service-based economy is stepping up its game to deliver everything from remote desktop experiences to disaster recovery, along with emerging platforms like marketing- and healthcare-as-a-service. With the ongoing rollout of 5G mobile technologies, we can expect an even wider range of web-based services to arise.

For too long, employees have been spending a considerable portion of their time trying to work around otherwise trivial technology problems or waiting for support from their IT departments. Nothing gets in the way of productivity faster than staring at loading screens and error dialogs, hence the need for more efficient and proactive support mechanisms. Being managed by third parties rather than overworked in-house teams, cloud services have simplified maintenance and support, and they continue to empower employees to focus on their core competencies.

In the old days, information siloes were the product of paper documents and physical media exchanged manually between relevant parties. It’s a process that becomes almost impossible to achieve at scale, at least if boosting efficiency is your primary goal. The coming years will continue to see the shift away from things like spreadsheets, documents, and emails to more centralised solutions which make all important resources readily available to those who need them. With employee experience entering the spotlight, that’s only getting more important.

The traditional model where office employees spend eight hours per day in front of an office desk is rapidly dying away. Today, work is all about flexibility, whether it’s getting a head start on the day’s work during the morning commute or even working exclusively from home. This development has allowed businesses to tap into talent all over the world without geographical boundaries getting in the way. In 2020, more companies will embrace flexible work models by creating cloud digital workspaces that deliver everything employees need to be at their best.

For some years now, the cloud has been hailed as a silver bullet to a whole raft of operational challenges. And, ever since its inception, debate has raged over which is better – the private or public cloud. The fact is that some workloads, especially those which involve very sensitive information, aren’t a great fit for the public cloud. Some are even still better off being handled in-house. As such, for most organisations, a hybrid approach works best, and more companies will start to benefit from that as we navigate the fourth industrial revolution.

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