The global quarantine instituted to slow the spread of the coronavirus has been challenging for enterprises. For those that are still able to operate, it’s provided an opportunity to assess everything from the importance of physical offices (which could be diminishing), remote work policies and the role of the digital workplace in facilitating employee productivity and collaboration. Smart companies are using this time to reflect and consider their preconceived notions about their ability to support a largely remote workforce, as well as employees’ ability to maintain productivity in this environment. Lessons learned now have the potential to position businesses for future success.

1. Innovation
A Shining Moment For Cloud
Computing And SaaS
392 views | Jun 8, 2020, 07:30am EDT
Ivan Fioravanti Forbes Councils Member
Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST | Paid Program
Fioravanti is an entrepreneur and an innovative technologist. He is currently
the CTO of CoreView.
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The global quarantine instituted to slow the spread of the coronavirus has been
challenging for enterprises. For those that are still able to operate, it’s provided
an opportunity to assess everything from the importance of physical offices
(which could be diminishing), remote work policies and the role of the digital
workplace in facilitating employee productivity and collaboration. Smart
companies are using this time to reflect and consider their preconceived notions

2. about their ability to support a largely remote workforce, as well as employees’
ability to maintain productivity in this environment. Lessons learned now have
the potential to position businesses for future success.
In my opinion, one of the most important lessons businesses should learn from
the pandemic is to trust their employees. Productivity through remote work has
risen in Canada and the U.S. since the quarantine began, not gone down. Some
employees have put any fears their bosses had of them not being able to remain
productive when not closely monitored to rest once and for all. Eliminating
commutes, open office layouts and chatty co-workers from the workday can
make it easier for employees to complete tasks. Enterprises are finding that
employees operate at a high level, provided they can communicate, collaborate
and access information and normal productivity apps. In fact, we’re seeing
employees minimize distractions and engage in deep focus sessions on complex
activities and planning.
The key to this success has been cloud computing and SaaS. History will look at
this time as the moment that the cloud and SaaS truly established themselves as
the pillars for modern business success. Digital transformation was once a nice-
to-have item for businesses, but the global quarantine turned it into a must-have
to ensure business continuity. Consider the following if this situation had
happened just 10 years ago:
• Businesses would have been reliant on VPNs to help employees securely access
corporate information. That strategy works fine during normal times but isn’t
easy — or cheap — to quickly scale to accommodate an organization’s entire
workforce.
• Most businesses relied on local apps to power their employees’ productivity. IT
teams would have been forced to work around the clock just to make sure their
workforce had the tools they needed to do their jobs.
Enterprises would not have been able to migrate hundreds, if not thousands, of
employees to remote working environments without the scalability of major
cloud and SaaS platforms. Cloud-native companies, in particular, are thriving
because they can continue to be fast and agile, while some companies have

3. struggled just to get online. Cloud and SaaS have proven themselves within a
dire circumstance, so we will likely see a huge increase in SaaS companies as a
result. As businesses adopt more SaaS apps and tools to support remote
workers, there will also be a need to better govern their cloud environments.
The pandemic may lead to wholesale changes in the ways that enterprise work-
from-home programs are executed. The optimist view on our current situation is
that it is allowing businesses to reflect on their company policies and IT
strategies. Digital transformation projects that had not been given priority
before, such as paperless processes and video collaboration tools, are being fast-
tracked and will deliver value well after employees return to the office.
But I also anticipate larger changes to emerge as businesses begin to better
understand the nature of work in the digital age. Will we move away from the 9-
to-5 workday that was introduced during the Industrial Age? How do we
facilitate person-to-person contact when people are working remotely? The
answers for all those questions lie ahead, but it’s comforting to know that the
technology needed to facilitate this change has arrived and is working
wonderfully.
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Ivan Fioravanti
Fioravanti is an entrepreneur and an innovative technologist. He is currently the CTO of
CoreView. Read Ivan Fioravanti's full executive pro le here.… Read More
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