This is What we Hope to Expect After the Pandemic 2021
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Construction Business Review | Friday, February 12, 2021
What happens Post the Pandemic? What lessons can take from one of the most devastating periods of human history. Here is a report.
Working from home will not change much. Even if the worst of the pandemic has passed and many people have been vaccinated, working from home will continue. The company found that when you let employees provide their own office space, their management costs will be reduced. Employees find that just because commuting is better, they like to work from home. But they both found that employees can be as efficient at home as they are in the office, and are usually more productive.
For some employees, the change is that home visits will become a regular function of work. Working from home is common, but as long as it's safe, there are reasons to go to the office. This means that IT employees will need to find ways to support employees at home and in the office at their convenience.
Safety support for employees working from home will become critical. When the pandemic started, everyone just went home and did their best. But since then, it has become clear that stronger security measures are needed. Phishing has become a huge problem, so IT staff will participate in building a business-level remote access system that protects users and the company. It is expected that commercial VPN, email security, remote access server and commercial anti-malware software can be configured for everyone.
Your IT budget may decrease in the first half of the year. In the past year, many companies have been trying to reduce revenue and are therefore reluctant to increase employees. However, they will still increase requirements, especially after new security threats (such as Russian hacking across the government) emerge.
The US government's large-scale invasion of Russia, coupled with several private companies, has scared managers, and they hope IT personnel can provide some assurance. But what really caught their attention was when they discovered that this was only the first hacker they found, not the worst.
In 2021, the United States is very likely to have another or worse security penetration method. You should be prepared by ensuring that your house is in order and explaining the situation to management.
5G will eventually be useful for businesses, but you still don’t see the dizzying speeds that Verizon is talking about. As T-Mobile and AT&T expand their 5G coverage, it will become available not only for making calls, but also for other tasks. You can expect to see the expansion of the IoT coverage of 5G and other 5G-based remote wireless services in 2021. If your employees can use 5G phones to better cover their work at home, they will also benefit from it.
Your staff will become fewer and fewer. The demand for IT staff will increase and salaries will increase. You will start to encounter retention issues, not just issues caused by social distance and viruses. You can expect to pay more or more to attract and retain IT talents.
Non-IT talents will be available at any time, and in many cases will be trained to become IT employees. In 2020, millions of educated and motivated workers will be unemployed and are happy to work for your company when a job is open. Some of these new employees will be exposed to technology and are likely to be candidates.
Privacy will be even more important. Although the requirement to protect personal information has never disappeared, the focus in 2020 is survival. As the pandemic subsides, companies will again need to pay attention to the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA. At the same time, other states and countries will start adding their own privacy rules, which will be required if you do business in that country. This may become a new area of expertise affecting IT, and more organizations will need to hire compliance officers to handle it.
You will need to ensure that the company’s operational technology areas and IT are equally protected. In many companies, these are two independent groups with little contact with each other, but finding ways to make IT and OT work together will become increasingly important. Attackers have begun to use IT to attack OT, and OT is used to attack IT. The united front is crucial.
