This year was really hard for the IT area due to the impact caused by the pandemic. “Consumer habits and also digital interactions allowed us to improve several traditional services, but this year the effort in the IT areas was huge, we had to do more with fewer resources,” said Pablo Barriga, Go Connect Solutions Architect at Licencias OnLine. “We worked long hours for secure remote connectivity projects (VPN’s), to have a remote worker enabled overnight. For our channels, their line of business was focused on services and leading them to develop more projects in software and with the cloud as a key facilitator”.
The market in the early months demanded connectivity and communications. Enabling secure access through VPN allowed companies to operate remotely. Then collaborative work was promoted and the most developed tool was the entire Office365 suite, especially Microsoft Teams, which was constantly upgraded with new functionalities during the year, allowing the company to synchronize its internal teams and enhance the relationship with its external clients.
2020 was also the year of applications, of how to upgrade my applications or move from physical processes to digital processes, transforming a traditional legacy environment to a website, mobile application or even containers. Cloud services found in Azure made this transition possible by implementing new infrastructures and allowing companies to be modernized.
Finally, in recent months, focus was placed on management. The new reality implies having everything remotely: infrastructure and employees. This has led to an expansion in the use of advanced endpoint security tools for both workstations and cell phones; the revival of MDM remote management and control of devices; and improved access to systems with two-factor authentication and privileged access control tools.
Go Connect’s Role
According to Barriga, the program has always promoted innovative solutions. “We have given several talks focused on the new reality, on new opportunities for teleworking, application virtualization, consuming cloud infrastructure and security for the new work endpoints. At the same time, we conducted workshops of all kinds, from real use cases to sales workshops, and we not only focused on providing the best solutions on the market for our partners, but also that they have the best advice and modern tools to support them in this context,” he explained.
The most prominent integrations were security and resiliency. “The advanced security of Check Point and Office365 is the solution that was developed the most this year,” he said. “Then, the integration of bringing backups to the Veeam cloud with Azure, and consuming everything as a service deployed in own clouds like Acronis or Veritas for backup issues.
Another outstanding scenario was consuming Virtual Desktops in Azure with Citrix Cloud integration. This enabled on-demand workspaces with a variety of compute capabilities to fit the needs of the modern company.
Getting ready for 2021
According to international consulting firms such as IDC or Gartner, in the coming year companies will continue to seek the path to a digitalization of all their processes. “To achieve this path, infrastructure and cybersecurity will be vital,” emphasized Barriga.
According to the executive, the infrastructure can be local, driven by technologies such as VMware with Vmware Cloud Foundation VCF, or cloud scenarios with Azure or AWS. Similarly, driving hybrid scenarios where SD-WAN technologies will allow to integrate communications in a simple way. To take care of investments in digitization, cybersecurity will be an important pillar. This safeguards the entire value chain of organizations, with proposals oriented to Zero-Trust scenarios or also access technologies such as SASE. Information security will be vital to take care of the valuable assets of organizations, DLP proposals for SaaS services and also DLP for endpoints to take care of the information that is being created in teleworking.
