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“ There are 16 different companies in our group comprising the mining , oil and gas and construction sectors . Because of the pandemic , many had to shut down completely while others could remain operational as essential services .

“ Fortunately , we have been progressive with our cloud strategy and have embraced a work from anywhere mindset , even prior to COVID-19 ,” says Kevin Wilson , GM Group IT Manager at Stefanutti Stocks , a VMware customer .

Even so , he said , some of the companies in the group had to rethink how they approach managing staff during the hard lockdown . For him , the fundamental lesson was that it was not about where people had to work from , but rather that they were fulfilling on their responsibilities .

“ Many learnt more about their technology in the first three months of COVID-19 than the three years prior to it . The acceleration towards a digital-centric mindset which we have been fighting for happened virtually overnight . Now , almost one year on and one of the key takeaways is that companies should not panic but rather embrace the work from anywhere mindset ,” he said .

According to Wilson , the biggest issue is that management must think differently about how to measure employee performance in this new environment .

Maturing market

Andrew Cruise , Managing Director of VMware partner , Routed , which builds and manages VMware clouds in South Africa , said that part of this mindset change has been the need for companies to identify the high availability and performance required from their business environments .

“ We have seen conversations accelerate towards the cloud and becoming more mature than in the pre-COVID-19 days . In those times there was a lot of cloud washing taking place . Today , enterprises have changed their thinking and are examining how best to embrace hyperscale providers , modernise apps and leverage web-native tools ,” he said .

Even though the pandemic has provided much of the impetus behind this maturing market , local companies remain concerned about the uncertainty of load shedding and the impact this could have on operations .

He said that COVID-19 has accelerated thinking about the cloud in general with companies under pressure to decide on how best to approach the transition from an immediate , practical side . It comes down to not wanting to own infrastructure in this environment but rather finding more innovative ways of using modern apps , while still using more traditional ones .

A question of leadership

Sunny Desai , Executive – Solutions , Engineering and Services at VMware partner , Aptronics , believes that these discussions revolve less around technology and more on the human side .

“ Transformation does not begin with technology but with leadership . In the past year , we have seen businesses who were undecided about the cloud to now see it as mandatory . The amount of technology available today means organisations and their customers are now embracing the cloud and overcoming any obstacles along the way . This is in contrast with the past where much of the attention was on discussing the cloud and less on actioning the move ,” said Desai .

However , he said the work from anywhere environment is still heavily dependent on whether employees are working from urbanised or rural areas . x www . intelligentcxo . com

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