The Evaluator Group conducted primary research that illuminates the state of enterprise IT as these organizations cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research consisted of an online survey of over 300 enterprise IT operations professionals plus 13 in-depth interviews. Respondents were primarily IT end users from organizations with 1,000 or more employees, from a range of industries. Full demographic information is included in the Appendix section of this report.
By and large, we found that IT professionals are presently in “react” mode, trying to make sure that the required hardware resources (e.g. laptops, network switches), security/data protection and cloud services (some are being rationed) needed to facilitate remote worker productivity are all available. The emphasis is on “keeping the lights on” and doing what is critical to maintain core business operations.
Many have been caught, unprepared for this scale of workforce displacement to remote urban and suburban locations. While we believe that the mid-to-long term impacts are still being assessed, we detected a feeling among these people that there will be some permanent versus temporary changes to IT “business as usual.” The IT organizations’ eyes have been opened to the fact that they need to be better prepared for the majority – if not all – of their workforce to operate remotely.
In our conversations with people we interviewed, it became clear that IT organizations that had developed and tested worst case disaster recovery scenarios were in the best place to manage through the pandemic. One Director of IT Operations stated that his company’s executives developed an immediate appreciation for all of his disaster recovery planning and efforts. “We see now why you have been planning in this way!”
Our analysis of the research results is categorized into these main areas:
- Views of IT’s new stay-at-home workforce
- Impacts to IT planning and project initiatives
- The criticality of security and data protection to supporting an at-home workforce
- The case for multi-cloud
- IT staffing impact
- Impacts to IT spending
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