While the pandemic could be subsiding thanks to the extensive vaccination of the world’s population, companies are proposing a return to offices and the use of corporate facilities.
This transition implies using new work models, new routines and even rethinking the need for an office. Workers are considering what impact the new models will have on their day-to-day operations.
Either way, companies need to maintain Business Continuity, sign documents and contracts, and securely access applications and files. These minimum requirements also require rethinking the management of networks and applications and solutions in the cloud that offer the necessary flexibility in a scenario without precise limits.
The future of work
PwC, in its Report on the Future of Work 2022, proposes three ‘worlds’ and grades them by colors.
- The blue world: In which the corporate environment prevails and is given relevance in using technologies, among other factors, to sensors and data analytics to optimize performance.
- The green world: For its part, seeks people with similar mentalities to collaborate in a familiar environment, attracted by its values and culture and with the use of technology to help people build work within their lives and minimize the environmental impact.
- The orange world: Technology provides the solution to find and evaluate working people and suppliers with crucial skills while including commercial terms within the offer as a specific task. At the same time, the reputation of the company within networking and online recruiting is crucial to attracting talent. Companies in the orange world use technology to generate virtual collaboration spaces.
The idea is not to completely adopt one of the worlds that PwC proposes but for companies to take what suits them best from each of them and create a corporate environment that meets their collaborators’ present and future needs, and those of its business allies and clients.
Eduardo Jordao, Channel Account Senior Manager, Adobe
The journey to digitization, which we are undertaking today, and to which governments, organizations and industries are all driving us, will succeed with the assistance of an applications ecosystem to provide agility to the processes while ensuring the security, reliability and protection of user data in any corporate and social environment.
But it is also crucial that these applications and platforms allow an extended offer of mobility and access to information.
Furthermore, every electronic signature process configured properly will be easier to implement to fulfill the security and legal conditions above other corporate methods known today. We cannot deny that electronic signatures imply a higher technical struggle for organizations. At the same time, they offer an advanced authentication method that complies with highly regulated and rigorous standards.
On top of these elements, the critical factor and the absolute value of the electronic signature rely on the fact that it offers confidence. With this confidence, at the end of each signature cycle, the user will receive the final document with the specific title, without allowing changes and with a declaration of the subscriber’s identity. This is the outcome with an application such as Adobe Sign.
Thus, offering applications with this capability to companies of any size protects revenues and opens opportunities for them to expand the business. This is crucial because the demand for digital services is booming and organizations must respond to new market requirements. The key is to be highly competitive, flexible and resilient. The electronic signature provides all this support.
A study from Forrester, commissioned by Adobe, bolsters all the information mentioned above. The survey revealed that 60% of business and technology leaders believe that electronic signatures are a critical requirement to support Business Continuity and agility during and after the pandemic, while 47% of respondents said that these solutions allow organizations to seek opportunities and win new customers in the current context.
Based on the above information, applications such as Adobe Sign play a crucial role in electronic signatures in today’s corporate environments, ensuring people and organizations that, by signing a document, they will receive it back with the required authentications and without worrying about critical changes.
Juan Pablo Villegas, Latin America Multicountry Director, Citrix
In 2019 most of us worked in the office from 8am to 5pm. We started and ended the day around the same time, protected and supported by local resources for our work.
However, the pandemic arrived and the way of working changed. And so, we had to adapt to a different dynamic, which sometimes silently required IT teams to adapt spaces and resources to a scenario that presented unknown and difficult challenges.
Two years have passed and we are continuing with the changes. Now that some companies are returning to their offices and others are in the process of evaluating the possibility of returning to physical spaces or staying away, the challenge becomes more complex. How can IT deal with this challenge without failing?
This job requires understanding the work team’s needs in terms of productivity, safety, flexibility and trust. This challenge requires delivering a top-of-the-line experience that emulates and connects the office with homes or any other destination from where employees decide to work.
It is an art, technological and innovative, but an art, after all: Workers need to be very productive without interruptions or obstacles as if they were connected in the same physical place but with more resources, opportunities and versatility than we had previously.
Of course, it is a matter of experience and security. Cybercriminals have expanded their scope, and no matter how good the remote or hybrid experience is, suffering a severe cyberattack can ruin everything.
According to the Security Survey from Citrix, in partnership with One Poll, there is a greater awareness of users towards cybersecurity at work. However, connecting employees to these virtual spaces presents potential risks; the technology sector must offer alternatives and consolidate employees’ good practices.
An architecture based on Zero Trust, for example, offers alternatives for monitoring and permanent control over people’s access to applications and data and their interaction with them. The Zero Trust architecture is how digital workspace solutions can find a robust response path capable of making sufficient efforts to improve the cybersecurity of remote work.
Solving security issues goes hand in hand with facing the new work environment. IT must deliver innovative workspaces that help users organize, plan, prioritize tasks and even personalize their space according to the functions they need daily and their personal preferences.
Fernando Sotelo, Customer Success Director for Latin America, Zoho
Organizations worldwide have decided to use cloud technologies to ensure Business Continuity in the past year. By having these platforms that use the Internet as their ‘distribution channel,’ IT sectors have been able to give continuity to business and have rapidly adopted new working models.
It is no secret that these technologies helped companies worldwide move from face-to-face to remote or hybrid work. However, they also brought new challenges that IT sectors must consider before deciding which ecosystem is adequate.
Let us begin by saying that CIOs must now assess technical conditions beyond their control, such as users who do not have broadband or prefer to work from their smartphones. This condition forces them to look for applications that operate from browsers or dedicated applications, which do not require a technological renovation. They work offline when necessary and synchronize when there is a stable network.
Data security and privacy are other significant challenges. IT sectors must be aware of the risks involved in handing over confidential information about their business and their customers to suppliers that do not have privacy among their priorities. They should choose providers that comply with regulations and the highest standards to guarantee the handling of the data, such as the EU’s GDPR and the CCPA of the State of California in the case of Zoho.
If these third parties have income based on advertising or selling marketing services, IT sectors must exercise their precautions to avoid their data becoming a ‘bargaining chip’ for activities not related to the cloud service they hired and for which they are paying.
To conclude, the final cost per user is another challenge in economies that, like Latin America, are experiencing a slow economic reactivation. By having unified systems that integrate multiple applications, companies save money on expensive integrations and harness the power of innovative technologies, such as AI.
These challenges face the need to implement methodologies for IT management, such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which allows determining the quality of service it receives and the development of the processes that cover the most critical activities of each organization in its operations, information systems and Information Technologies.
By implementing ITIL processes with cloud software for remote work, companies can maintain the security and privacy of its customers’ data and improve the control of its equipment, activities, resources and devices.
