There is no doubt the impact COVID-19 had (and continues to have) on businesses. As the pandemic persists, some companies look to re-open offices while others remain closed, coping with a distributed workforce. In late summer 2020, Keypoint Intelligence launched our annual Business Technology Solution primary research that focuses on capture and solution technologies in business. The objective is to discover new and changing scan activities, acquisitions, and behaviors. While we expected to see a shift in workers movements from office to home office, we discovered that while small and large sized companies have encountered similar challenges, they navigate and focused on very different areas.
During the fielding of our research, we found that while most businesses’ physical offices were closed (partially or fully), work from home was active—progressing and (in some cases) flourishing. Respondents claimed at least 50% of employees were working from home, with some suggesting many would become permanent. The heavy lift that comes with mass shifts from offices to homes, from an IT perspective alone, is enormous. For some companies, there was already a culture of remote working and an infrastructure was in place. In other cases, this was a mass disruption and often left companies scrambling to connect and supply workers with the tools they need to perform everyday tasks.
From the beginning of the pandemic, “access” was the name of the game. Basic tools such as laptops and desktops were a top priority and highly requested for working at home—and they will continue to be for the foreseeable future. With a distributed workforce, IT’s concerns now shift toward fortifying the infrastructure and strengthening security protocols. A secure and vital VPN creates the foundation for business process and content retrieval. Cybersecurity assaults during COVID-19 have skyrocketed, as brute force, phishing, and ransomware attacks are a daily occurrence. When inquiring to the biggest security risks IT faces with a distributed workforce, 53% said “lack of security training and education among employees.”
As COVID-19 continues, the face-to-face contact many workers have come to rely on has now transferred to online. Immediate access to conference and collaboration solutions for companies and integration for IT was immediate and proves to be vital. A new era of web-enabled solutions such as Zoom and Teams is meant to streamline communications, internally and externally. For IT, providing the available office tools is part of its foundation. Users expect access to print, copy, and scan functions. Many companies were able to supply office equipment to employees for working from home. Printers and scanners, along with monitors and headsets, were given for employee use while at home—and some of these employees are going to be permanently working from home.
These new assets need to be just as secure as if in the physical office. In instances where equipment wasn’t supplied, workers used their personal devices to print and scan. Scanning was said to be increasing on a variety of capture devices. Emphasis was placed on scanning into business and enterprise content systems. Smartphones often serve to quickly snap a picture of a document and send to email, share or to save as electronic.
The movement towards digitization will grow, accelerated by the new working conditions many companies now face. Digital transformation has long been an objective for all company sizes and types, rooting out paper and automating manual processes. No longer a lofty goal, digitization is seen as being critical to continued business success—especially as many companies continue to support a distributed working environment.
The entire results of the 2020 Business Technology and Solutions primary research is available now on our InfoCenter for our Image Scanning Trends clients. Not a subscriber? No problem! Just send us an email at sales@keypointintelligence.com for more info.