For many of us March will mark a full year of lockdown. Few of us would’ve believed that we’d still be ‘WFH’ and wearing masks twelve months on, but hopefully the days and weeks ahead will finally see us adding the phrase ‘post-pandemic’ to our Covid-19 lexicon.

But has the way that we do business fundamentally changed as a result of Covid? For James Hirst, COO & Co-Founder of Tyk, "The lockdowns have shown across multiple industries that workers do not have to be confined to the traditional office environment to produce their best work. Our business has been 'remote by default' since we were founded in 2014, meaning we let employees work from wherever they want, when they want… I expect remote working to become the norm for many of us as the world begins to recover from the pandemic, as most organisations will have seen the benefit of adopting a more flexible approach to working practices. That said, I don't think the traditional office will ever disappear as impromptu conversations and human interactions really help to spark creativity, problem solving and provide valuable networking opportunities."

The sudden shift to remote working has thrown up any number of technological challenges for the network. How do you keep a suddenly dispersed workforce secure and productive? According to Mark Towler, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Progress, "The organisations that adapted to the new Covid normal are now dealing with a world where the health of their network has become even more important than ever. When an employee can’t connect in order to do any work all day, the cost of network downtime escalates dramatically."

And it’s not just businesses that have adapted to work in the pandemic after all – so too have cybercriminals. Liviu Arsene, Global Cybersecurity Researcher at Bitdefender, observes that "Coronavirus themed emails might have been a popular choice during the first half of 2020, but attackers have also demonstrated an ability to shift towards different topics quickly… Social relief, traveling, and even extortion attempts by claiming to have exploited vulnerabilities in popular video conferencing software to record their victims covertly have been just some campaigns threat actors have used to capitalise on the Covid-19 pandemic." Whether it’s Covid-19 itself or cybercriminals trying to profit from it, now is clearly not the time to let our guard down.

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