COVID: Opportunity to Change
The pandemic has given rise to new perspectives for both individuals and enterprises owing to the current social distancing scenario with reduced human contact. While the internet has become a basic necessity for people just like Food, Water and Shelter, enterprises are expected to build different strategies to tackle the situation and ride the digital wave quickly and efficiently.
Technology is propelling the digital trends in the world and all businesses, large or small, have started transitioning to virtual spaces, transforming the usual ways of working. This ‘New Normal’ is bringing together the global communities across various industries as well as geographies. Post COVID era would require us to embrace some of the most palpable changes like Work from Home (WFH) as well as the other subtle yet significant ones like Multi-Skilled workforce and technological migrations through “Automation”.
Let’s walk through the most noteworthy changes expected during and post the pandemic.
WFH, Remote Work Culture:
Due to social distancing norms, a lot of companies have enabled their employees to work remotely and have extended their WFH policy till 2021. All the office communications are now carried out via Video or Phone calls through channels like Teams, Zoom or Webex, oh! yea Google Meet is also in the list. Some of the most spoken sentences during this COVID era have to be “Sorry, I am on mute”, “Am I audible” and “Is my Screen visible”. Hehe! Hope you can relate.
WFH has certainly reduced the annoying commute but has also scaled down the entertainment choices like going out for clubbing (for Bangaloreans), nevertheless, people are finding creative solutions staying at home, such as virtual parties, Comedy Shows, birthday celebrations and even graduation ceremonies. So, even as it has taken away some things, it has definitely given us new members in our life “Internet, the Hero” that keeps us connected to people and “Villain, the ISP” that tries to pull us apart from them :D
Jokes apart, WFH comes with its fair share of advantages and disadvantages and it entirely depends on the side you are on — you may get to spend extra time with your family but with an office laptop and headphones always on standby hehe!, or you may save your commute time and expenses. Whatever be the case, you definitely need a good “Hero”, I mean the internet in your life more than ever before!
Upskilling and Reskilling:
It has always been a top priority for Tech companies to train and prepare their workforce for tomorrow but in the current need for automation and multi skilled resources, it should become a prime focus for people as well. Today’s workforce needs to have more potential than ever before and a conscious investment in acquiring new skills will pave the path to becoming more productive and staying relevant. As we have some additional time at hand, we need to ensure that we upskill and reskill ourselves because this is going to serve as the only saviour that will keep us at our jobs or help find one.
The upskilling trend seems to be catching up as more and more people are posting course completion certificates on Linkedin. This showcases the fact that aspiring candidates are adding more skills to their toolkit using internet resources like online learning academies and certifications leveraging platforms like Udemy, Linkedin Learning, etc.
Automation of Business Processes:
Technology and automation have become such an integral part of our lives that we often tend to ignore the enormous impact it has on our day to day activities.
As we all continue to learn navigating through the pandemic, the prime focus for businesses has been the well being of their employees and customers as well as ensuring business continuity while reducing the operating expenses. After an initial bump, the companies are becoming resilient and adapting to the changing market expectations by minimizing the manual efforts and moving towards ‘automation’ of processes. Using automation utilities for RPA or Process Automation enables the businesses to remain connected with their customers and provide them proper timely assistance.
The growing acceptance of ML, AI, Cloud technologies, Container services and Infrastructure as a Code (IAC) has generated even more automation opportunities across the enterprises.
I know a lot of people across various domains who have recently adopted (for good hehe!) different automation platforms like Zapier, IFTTT, Buffer, Demisto, Ansible etc. during this COVID era.
Automation of business processes can include simple tasks like Excel Report Automation and Invoice Management to complex Information Security tasks related to SOC and Threat Hunting.
The benefits of automation, you may ask?
Automation makes the menial yet important tasks more efficient and less prone to errors. Not just that, you can also automate the complicated tasks like Security Assessments & Threat Hunting using the more sophisticated platforms and instruments like Playbook, automation scripts, etc.
Let’s take a look at one of the most common business scenarios witnessed recently:
With most of the world in lockdown for several weeks, the contact center employees were unable to provide customers any support causing confusion and dissatisfaction amongst them. To address the situation, many companies moved to automations via artificial intelligence in the form of Chatbots that are capable of handling customer queries and quickly ramped up IVR capabilities to provide basic information like account balance, last transactions, auto feedback and so on.
I have only picked up one example form the service based industry but to summarize, some of the direct benefits of automation for the businesses are:
- Resilience and scalability of the processes critical to your business.
- ‘Digital workers’ can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without any breaks.
- Easy to scale up or scale down the automation bot or playbooks per your business requirements and customer footfall.
- No commute required, so your bots are safe on the computer, just ensure they aren’t falling in love with ‘Ransomware’ or “Malware”.
- Automation reduces the need for employees to perform confidential activities outside office premises to a great extent.
- Workforce does not have to perform some of the tedious tasks enabling them to focus on bringing higher value to the business.
- Moreover, automation saves a great deal of time and office space, improves the workflow and maximize results.
Fact check: Some of the skepticism around automation stems from the assumed need for Ninja Coders or specialized enterprise tools. Even as this may apply in some cases but most of the basic level automation can be achieved by utilizing ready made tools like ‘Zapier’ or ‘IFTTT’, even the basic Bash & Python script should enable you to automate basic tasks.
This pandemic is the time of reflection for both individuals and businesses, for people to invest in learning and gain new skills while setting down in the virtual ways of working and for businesses to focus on becoming more sustainable for the long term and use the technology to their advantage, turning these times into an opportunity for growth.
As for myself, Security Automation is what I do everyday and I totally enjoy working with complex security tools and open source technologies to manage the security infrastructure. If you want to connect for any automation and security use cases, feel free to reach out as I would love to solve technology related problems :).
~AshishSecDev
