The impact of the novel coronavirus is affecting every sector in every market. A pandemic tends to have the effect of being life-changing and world-changing all around, and information technology is no exception to this rule. Things are changing at every level for better and for worse, but in the information age, IT has to be involved at every step.
Companies have faced the challenge of whether or not to allow work from home, but shelter-in-place orders and fear have forced their hands. People have started to work from home en masse. Now that the cat's out of the bag, it may not be ever going back in.
The IT industry will have to adapt to survive, let alone thrive. You can't just bury your head in the sand and "wait this thing out." Even when the virus is largely gone, change still will have happened. To adapt, you have to look at what is happening, what it means for the industry and how it can be accomplished.
Where Are We Headed?
With most shelter-in-place orders still in effect, people are going to work from home where they can. We've already hit the point that working from home is a habit for most workers, and habits are hard to change. Work from home provides unique benefits to both the employer and the employee, but it also presents unique challenges for IT.
People are getting used to working from home. This means that their schedule slowly comes closer to being a 24/7 engagement on average rather than a traditional 8-5 workweek. It also means that IT needs to be available to fix anything and everything without controlling the environment. Your employee's computer breaking at night when they're supposedly done with work doesn't mean they won't call in. That's not just their personal computer anymore; it's their work computer, and they can't just wait to go into the office.
Work from home also means that small to large businesses are going to begin reducing their office spaces. It just makes financial sense if you've removed the question of can you function remotely. I believe companies with fewer than 10,000 employees will largely shift from offices to mostly remote setups
While the logistics look harder at face value, you don't need to acquire more space, move buildings or worry about insurance in exchange for harder coordination. Once you iron out the hardest processes because you have to, all that is left is giving everything and everyone the ability to communicate. That's where IT and technology come into play.
What Does It All Mean?
IT is going to have to move up the stack. If you run an MSP or even internal IT, you need to abstract problems to make the technological solutions easier. People don't want VPNs or a special setup to connect in. They want their experience to be seamless at every level. Managed IT solutions need to move up the stack and become more abstract.
A centralized cloud platform means a predictable and reliable user experience at the expense of more cost for continued operations. Setup costs are usually lower and there is very little variability between bills. This abstraction creates and necessitates the expectation that everything runs smoothly 24/7/365.
Corporate help desks will need to be reinforced, MSPs will need to either hire up or outsource their help desk, and every vendor in between will be weighed more heavily based on their hours of operation. Traditional working hours are going the way of the dodo. You need true 'round the clock availability no matter what. Anything less loses its competitive edge. Due to this fact, I think help desks will end up either getting co-managed.
Implementation
Cloud offerings will become more and more attractive, as will managed help desks. VPNs and similar solutions suffer from any insufficiency in either the employee or employer's network. Remote management solutions can quickly overwhelm a business' internet connection. Cloud solutions use their weight to acquire lower pricing for upkeep in order to make an offering cheaper than any smaller company can manage.
It's easy to commit to building out a truly 24/7/365 help desk, but how many overnight and weekend workers are enough? Does your business ebb and flow, or is it steady? What about when something unexpected happens? We all have more than enough until we don't. A minor outage can easily snowball into a major storm of tickets, especially if it's the equivalent of tax season for accountants in many industries. You have to plan for the unexpected, and the only way to do is to scale past where you can scale alone.
If you do decide to try and scale this yourself, you'll need to throw resources at it. You need to add more technicians than are strictly needed in the event of spikes in work. Just because you're busy doesn't mean your contractual obligations change. You need to have higher-tier techs available outside of standard work hours. On-call is the traditional way of handling this, but it's a quick way to burn out your staff without higher compensation or balance.
You also need a good remote access platform. The solution you use affects how you can administer your environment. A free RMM might be OK for manual tasks, but it may be unusable for automation. Does your remote access tool scale to match your help desk? Is it secure? How do you provide assistance to people working from home from their own machine? The solution you choose needs to fit your organization and its goals.
MSPs and internal IT both benefit from consumption-based help desk offerings. You may not be able to afford a true tier 3 technician, but you can afford one sometimes. Consumption-based solutions mean that you can get access to more specialized resources like the much less questionable version of a timeshare. You can't have a project engineer every day and take on the risk of an employer, but you can have them as needed at a premium.
