Top Business Challenges Caused
by COVID-19

As businesses around the country and the world began to experience the impacts of Covid-19, we knew we had to listen and support our customers like never before. While consistent and meaningful customer communication is our standard, we boosted our efforts to listen and learn what our customers needed to navigate the challenges of shutdowns, business revenues, and more.

Our survey included businesses across various industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, retail, finance, technology, biosciences, and more. Not surprisingly, each company faced its own unique challenges. As we analyzed the data, however, we found that their most pressing needs could be categorized into four main groups:

1. Cloud and IT infrastructure: a need for technology to support new work demands such as remote work, greater process automation, and meeting health and safety guidelines.
2. Workflow and process automation: paper-based workflows don't work with distributed workforces facing an increased need for communication and collaboration to drive day-to-day operations and decision-making. 
3. Remote work enablement: employees working from home introduce a host of business challenges beyond connectivity, such as information and cybersecurity, business continuity, and disaster recovery. 
4. Ensuring a safe and smart workplace: where many employees can work remotely, the vast majority cannot, demanding solutions to maximize new considerations for workplace safety, such as reducing the number of shared surfaces. 

By categorizing business challenges in this way, we make addressing them more manageable. Yet, behind these four groups lies a single, unifying idea that we saw was consistent with every customer: a desire to accelerate their digital transformation.

The term digital transformation is not new to most business leaders today. What no one could have anticipated was how quickly the need to implement digital transformation technologies would accelerate.

From our survey, we could see that all of our customers recognized a need to equip their newly dispersed workforce with the right tools to help them remain focused and efficient while also enabling workforce agility - the ability for employees to securely access information where and when it's needed. 

While many customers surveyed felt they had the foundation to adequately support employees working remotely, they were still dealing with a number of crucial questions: 

• How long will business performance be impacted by current uncertainty?
• How can we ensure employees stay safe, connected, and motivated?
• How can we overcome security risks inherent in a remote workplace?
• What emerging technological solutions will help us adapt and thrive in the new world of work?

These questions, and the sudden and urgent business challenges they reflected, revealed a practical need tied to digital transformation. They needed a partner to support and guide their digital transformation efforts. 

This fact did not surprise us. In MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte's Digital Business Report, 80% of respondents from digitally-advanced companies say their organizations cultivate partnerships with other organizations to facilitate digital innovation. 

As a company that is often that partner, we understand that with today's circumstances, a clear need exists to simplify the complexities of accelerating the rollout of remote and digital solutions to empower agile work experiences.