A lot has changed in the last few weeks with one of the largest and most disruptive virus outbreaks the modern world has ever seen. On March 11, 2020 – The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. The pandemic forcefully sent millions of students, individuals and corporates employees to their work-from-home experiment worldwide. Anything-as-a-Service(XaaS) has found its new importance and every industry will invest to bring out the best possible innovative ways to ensure every individual is a digital consumer in the future. In this crisis, cloud service companies have also suddenly seen a spike in global consumption.

3i Infotech’s Remote Worker will play an important role, as it allows seamless working from anywhere and successfully supports corporate internal employees and customers across the globe. Many corporates are planning to make this a normal practice even after the pandemic ends. Some companies have also stated that they will plan and phase out 50-75% of employees to workfromhome for next couple of years. Cloud providers that include AWS, Azure, Google and Alibaba are working non-stop to prove that they can enable and support large number of users with more security and next-gen technologies like IOT, AI, VR/AR etc.

At 3i Infotech, we are working to shift our customers’data centre by adopting a cloud-based model that will enable their IT teams to access their hardware, applications and data from anywhere/anytime. Every company’s IT organization, whether it is small or large, will be able to match the efficiencies and agility of the cloud. For example,one of our customers is into retail operation with several work locations in Middle East. We were able to successfully migrate them to SAP S4 HANA,to take advantage of the benefits of reduced operational risk and enhanced digital capabilities.Similarly, another customer of ours wanted their employees to access their legacy enterprise application from their home and be able to provide any support or maintenance without having to move out of their workfromhome (WFH) location. We helped their employees to use our Remote Worker solution that allows to connect their legacy applications over secure and encrypted VPN services. In the current crisis, secure cloud architectures are now an ‘essential requirement’ for all enterprises around the world.

From home-based collaborative learning solutions for students or an online consultation to patients by healthcare professionals,who are trying to deliver care remotely, every profession or business will require a solution that is easily accessible with apt security on both sides.

3i Infotech has IP based products that cater to financial institutions, insurance companies and banks. We are preparing for the next phase once the pandemic begins to wither out. The financial institutions will see a sudden spike in loans and new insurance claims,which will lead to solutions that will help in processing the same in a costeffective manner.The collaboration, conferencing, and digital workplace tools that are working as a saviour in the current situation are all cloud-based. These tools that are backed by the robustness of the cloud, have now become essential infrastructure, proven to enable business continuity of work in the recent times.

So if ‘work from home’ is going to be the new norm,the cloud services and the collaboration platforms will keep people connected and allow them to have meetings and complete their projects from anywhere, anytime and perhaps even before time. There are many advantages of working remotely for employees -they don’t have to commute and rush to office. One can multi-task and do the house hold chores through the day while doing officework. It will not just benefit the employees but also the corporates, as remote work will be an important part of hiring and retaining top talent, while saving operational costs.

So, the pandemic is creating a new norm to work from anywhere, anytime, which will be the workculture of future, more than a just a trend. Technology will become more advanced and will continue to bring us all virtually closer than ever, across time zones and continents,as we have seen in the last few weeks. Travel will continue to be a challenge for some time and hence we all may not be physically in the same room, but work can be just as effective as it has been proved. It’s time for all of us to embrace the new culture called workfromhome and adapt to the technology that is making it happen.