The Next Normal: How to Prepare Your Workforce for the Next Big Pivot

If there is one thing 2020 made abundantly clear, it’s that the way in which workers operate will never be the same. As employees rushed to set up monitors and home offices in their new environments, businesses across the world were recognizing an inevitable reality:: that this new lifestyle was here to stay.

“As this progresses, the next normal is going to be about mobility and flexibility. We've got a taste of this working from home thing that [we’ve] never had before, and they're going to want to do both, which is going to bring on new challenges.”

Welcome to the “Next Normal,” where new remote working demands are establishing a host of lifestyle changes for employees, and concurrently creating a larger list of challenges for their employers. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Kim Huffman, the VP of Global IT at Elastic, opens up about distributed workforces and why Elastic believes strongly in them. But she is honest about the obstacles that work from anywhere creates when it comes to managing the endpoints of your fleet, and she discusses how IT leaders can handle the transition.

Main Takeaways

• Know Your Fleet: For distributed teams, having an understanding of your endpoints is critically important. You need to always be thinking about where you are most vulnerable at those endpoints, and the points of attack they may be opening themselves up to to understand how they can be as secure as possible. Managing your endpoint
• Drink Your Own Champagne: One of the more important operating principals  at Elastic is its ability and willingness to test its own products in-house. When you beta test your apps with your own team, it affords you the opportunity to fix bugs or breakdowns within the system prior to that product ever reaching the customer.
• Is This Secure? Just because you are operating on a VPN network, does not necessarily mean your network is secure. Even when you are on VPN, the user is still subjected to various forms of cyberattacks. As IT leaders, it’s important to constantly be evaluating the incoming information from your devices and managing them at their endpoints.

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