Your 2022 IT myth buster blog

The 3 main IT myths.

We all hope 2022 will be the year that puts the pandemic behind us. But even in the most optimistic scenario, covid will leave deep marks on the way we live and work, and we definitely won’t get back to the way things were done in 2019.

Now that legal restrictions are being lifted, we can see numerous discussions about what’s best between working from home or getting back to the office. As for many such discussions, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. It’s about finding the right balance, enabling a healthier personal life for employees while keeping the benefits of social collaboration and personal interactions in the office.

As companies are getting prepared to welcome their employees back into their office, I needed to address some of the misconceptions I could read here and there.

Myth #1:
Hybrid working was only a temporary response to the pandemic.

We can safely say that, before the pandemic hit, most organisations were reluctant to let their employees work away from their office. But after being forced to embrace it overnight in 2020, they often found out that a flexible workplace is actually better, for both the company and its people.

This helped challenge some of the misconceptions of the old world, in which people felt they needed to come early and/or stay late in the office to show they were productive. Organisations realized that productivity did not depend only on the number of hours sitting in an office. And that offering mobile desks and the possibility to work remotely reduced the need for office space, thus directly saving them money.

The way companies embrace hybrid working has also become a strong differentiation factor and already helps them attract the best talents. Hybrid workers can find a better work-life balance and don’t constantly feel they need to adapt their personal situation to their employer. The Jabra hybrid ways of working 2021 global report even showed that people are now placing flexible working above salary as a benefit they’re looking for in a company.

• Conclusion: Remote working is not just a temporary patch to go through this crisis. It will become part of the new normal, and organisations will have to face its challenges sooner or later. Do I need to specify that sooner would be better?

I developed in my previous blog about the danger of a partial transformation, and how to make it as complete and efficient as possible.

Myth #2:
Technology is the answer to everything.

When organisations were forced to enable remote work overnight in 2020, they first tackled business-critical processes and set up technical solutions to allow remote access to any tool or data that was necessary for business continuity. But then forgetting about other things that were lost in the process, mostly because they can’t be tracked at the bottom of an Excel spreadsheet. Meaning they cannot be that important, right?

Technology will indeed help your organisation to efficiently forward tasks or data without personal contact, but it won’t make people find a sense or motivation in them. Company culture, team spirit, trust, are making everyone’s work enjoyable and meaningful, and are the real driver for productivity. And they are all about social interactions, more than technology. Working remotely has put a stop to short-term availability and fluent personal exchanges, and the barrier caused by the geographical distance cannot be completely overcome with current technologies. Maybe this will change one day when we are all in the metaverse?

Technology is not the solution to switch your organisation to a successful hybrid model. It is an enabler, a fantastic one, but not more than that. Organisations will always be about people. Therefore, companies need to go a step further, give their people the autonomy they need to thrive while setting clear guidelines and processes. They need to listen to what their employees want, but more importantly, understand why they want it. And only then comes technology, to help achieve these goals. 

• Conclusion: people need to be at the centre of the transformation process. Technology is only a tool that cannot serve or enable processes if they don’t exist in the first place.

Myth #3:
SaaS solutions automatically secure my data

SaaS solutions are incredibly attractive to assist the transformation to a hybrid model. They empower organisations to work and access any business tool or resource from anywhere, in a secure and uncomplicated way. What providers often forget to tell you though, is that these solutions do not secure the data you store in them.

Indeed, most SaaS solutions such as Microsoft Office 365 will only secure their “side”, meaning the physical data centre as well as the software itself. But your actual data, which is the backbone of most businesses, is not protected against security threats (internal or external), let alone human errors. They even have a nice term for that, it’s called a “shared responsibility model”.

Your SaaS provider will not help you prevent security breaches or detect an account that has been compromised or is behaving dangerously. It is therefore critical to have additional solutions in place that will ensure data recovery and business continuity at any time, no matter what happens. There is a very wide panel of security solutions out there, on-premise, cloud-based or hybrid. Primenet can help you design and implement the best alternative for your business.

• Conclusion: SaaS solutions are convenient but require an additional security layer in order to ensure data protection and business continuity. At the end of the day, organisations are the ones responsible to keep their data secure

Our team at Primenet, provide honest and reliable guidance to ensure you have digital resilience in an ever-changing IT landscape. 

Nicolas Ahiskali
Business Director Europe