How the pandemic spurred remote innovation

It's said necessity is the mother of invention, and with the past year necessitating businesses to quickly adjust as the world shut down, companies have found innovation in remote work.

"If the pandemic has shown us anything, it has shown us that we have to have as much flexibility in our infrastructure and in our workforce as we can possibly have," said Kristin Stewart, chief financial officer for Cii Technology Solutions.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees were not permitted to work remotely, regardless of their preferences, so finding out a business can not only function, but flourish with a remote workforce has been eye opening.

Though it may seem counterintuitive to some, when employees are given the freedom to work from home, they may actually do better work for a company.

Another advantage is employees don't waste hundreds of hours every year on commuting.

"Because a lot of employees have shed a commute, that much more productivity adds to their day and also work-life benefits," said Mike Taylor, Cii's vice president of business development.

Even when offices re-open, some employees may prefer to work remotely some or all of the time.

"With these new abilities to work in different places, people are working more, spending more time on different projects, and I think we're going to see more productivity come from that," said Taylor.

Remote work has changed the way colleagues have collaborated during the pandemic.

"We used to go into the conference room, meet, discuss things," said Taylor. "We used to share files and information."

Companies have turned to the cloud to keep employees on the same system and to offer collaboration tools that let teams chat, video conference, and share files and calendars.

"It's kept that interoffice feel," said Taylor.

As companies decide how to operate moving forward, collaboration tools will be essential.

"My belief is that most companies are going to be moving to some sort of hybrid set-up, where their employees are going to be working part of the time in the office and part of the time out of the office," said Stewart.

As companies have supported remote work, it's become less feasible to house everything in servers onsite.

"It doesn't make sense for each person to build their own data center," said Taylor. "Unless you are a very large organization, monetarily and workflow wise, it's not going to make sense not to be in the cloud."

The cloud has allowed businesses to be flexible with where employees work, while keeping them connected to their business applications.

"The cloud is the very best solution for when you have employees working in different places at the drop of a hat because they don't have to have two completely different work set-ups," said Stewart. "They can have one connection to the cloud from wherever they are, and it just makes that whole flexible experience so much easier to support from an IT standpoint and so much less frustrating."

While previous innovations may have been all about changing a physical workspace, new innovations will allow for change on a grander scale.

"I think that the office set-up is going to be more fluid going forward, and so the ability for people to move wherever they want, even inside an office space is just so much easier to manage with the cloud," said Stewart.