I came across this information from the US:
The corona crisis in the US is reinforcing a trend on the real estate market: The Americans are leaving the mega-cities for small towns. They pack their bags in New York, Boston and San Francisco and view apartments in Colorado, New Mexico or Texas. The higher quality of life and lower prices have given rise to longing for suburbia and country air, and the pandemic has intensified them. Suddenly the office moved into the home and was therefore mobile all over the country. At the same time, the longing for space and nature has increased with the corona hotspots in metropolises.
Comparing this with the situation here where people are getting sick and tired of the lockdowns in Metro Manila and in Cebu, I am sure that many people are having the same thought: leaving the city and finding space in the suburbia and beyond, provided sufficient broadband is available to make work from home possible.
As we continue to navigate our way through the effects of the global pandemic and hope to get business back on track fast, we are aware that we have no choice but to adjust to the New Normal in our working environment.
Let me highlight two things:
a. Data is the most sought after and powerful commodity of recent times. Big data has become its own industry, and we are now living in a data economy. Compliance data is no different, when leveraged correctly it has the potential to identify and prioritize risks, help allocate resources to prioritize risks, and allow companies to make better (more accurately informed) decisions.
b. The coronavirus has imposed changes in the working environment on us and the way we do business now, with emphasis on how we protect the people working for us, in the office and from home, how we protect our systems and our data, and how we create a safe infrastructure in the Work From Home (WFH) environment that is to stay with us, even after Corona19.
But we have to consider issues and solutions when adopting a more flexible and virtual office set-up. Compliance and security issues need to be evaluatedbased on the technologies available.
We are certain that businesses will recover faster by developing and implementing new business strategies to adjust to what is considered the new normal. Businesses need to adopt certain technologies to maintain the integrity of processes and protect data in a different environment.At the same time, business operations should not depend on access to an office building, or on IT infrastructure being physically accessed by employees. In order to ensure that businesses can run 24/7, now is the time to embrace technologies such as Cloud computing, teleconferencing, virtual desktops and productivity applications.
Companies need to reorganize their IT infrastructure to accommodate more flexible WFH arrangements, and this might mean a significant portion of employees will continue to work from home after the ECQ and MCQ. If this is the case, data security and protection become top areas of concern.
The conclusion,
• With WFH, in the city or in suburbia, going to continue beyond the coronavirus, companies will have to invest more into security infrastructure; that infrastructure is available,
• The training of employees on the operational level is essential so that data breaches can be avoided.
If you need assistance in building and protecting your WFH infrastructure, send me an email – Schumacher@eitsc.com