Justin Day, CEO of Cloud Gateway
Over the past few years, many businesses have begun to adapt to a more flexible form of working. Less office-based, more free-roaming. This adaptation has been slow but steady. Today, as the UK approaches a month of lockdown, businesses have had to turbocharge their digital capabilities and remote working policies to ensure their survival against the ever-challenging backdrop of Coronavirus.
Looking across a number of industries, some have been proactive in the home-working revolution, whilst other industries, such as financial services have remained in-office. This is due to the nature of their work, requiring highly secure environments or rapid communication and collaboration to ensure regulatory compliance. Now, with their hands forced, financial services organisations up and down the UK are having to adapt. A robust technology and telecoms infrastructure are no longer a nice-to-have but a key deciding factor as to whether security, productivity and capability are still well-executed.
As financial services organisations race to ensure the smooth running of their day-to-day practices, they have to jump a few hurdles. Problems such as secure remote access to company-wide servers, cloud capacity and security, and other issues that may have taken the back seat previously, are now the pressing matters that need to be prioritised to ensure that employees can access company ecosystems from disparate locations, all at once.
The barriers to working from home
Facing an unprecedented disruption to both people’s personal lives as well as businesses MO’s due to the current pandemic, companies have had to evolve, almost overnight, and place their trust on remote access infrastructure to keep employees connected and services running. Whilst servers struggle to hold the huge influx of people attempting to gain access remotely, businesses need to be certain that they are investing in the correct part of their business and with technology solutions that will ultimately save them during this extremely difficult time, and smoothen the transition of future transformation.
Patching up the office-to-home gap
Cue, the cloud. With businesses desperate for directions on how to keep their employees able to work remotely, a secure access cloud connectivity platform is a great way for companies to eliminate their woes. With the ability to be implemented instantly, remotely and securely within a business, cloud-based comms platforms are a great means for companies to quickly establish a distributed architecture for their network.
With cloud, the question of capacity is easily dealt with. Innovative and modern cloud comms platforms are able to scale traffic, as well as offer flexible adjustments, as needed to ensure that your company can prioritise what it needs, when it needs it most – something that is critical for fintech businesses that are relying on speedy data processing. Through its implementation, businesses can also save on potential unused software or add-ons that you would usually pay premiums on but seldom use, allowing them to cost-cut during this crisis.
Priority 1: Security
A lot of companies will be battling with themselves on who and what they can trust in this current environment, and with that, cybersecurity is more crucial than ever in protecting data within financial services and beyond. The financial services industry holds an incredible amount of sensitive data and needs to prioritise, while remaining confident, that the system they put in place won’t be compromised or be subject to unnecessary risk. Cloud-based platforms can have integrated security measures that can ensure businesses work securely. Modern add-ons, a key mechanism of cloud-based platforms, help automate the process of tracking risk to more effectively streamline processes while minimising the risk of human error.
A look into the future
Cloud technology is fast becoming embraced as a crucial savior for companies worldwide in both short and long-term strategies. The difficult situation we face may now also pose the perfect opportunity for permanent changes to modernise the ways many businesses had worked prior to the outbreak. Cloud adoption allows for companies to scale their IT needs up and down quickly, and ultimately will make future digital transformation simpler. With the Government shutdown set to continue, future investment into the cloud could prove itself key to keep the sky from falling and the sun shining for companies in the long run.
