3 IT trends that will stay with us for a long time.

1. Most employees expect to be able to work partially or permanently from home even after the pandemic ends.

The massive transition to remote work during the pandemic was a necessity for many office-based companies that wanted to maintain operations. However, many of these same companies realized the benefits of remote work and, as a result, are adopting hybrid work models for the long haul.

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And these expectations of remote working opportunities have become a reality. Workers already know that they can and do work remotely and increasingly this is how they want to work even after the pandemic is over. The trend has become so strong that some employees are even considering changing jobs if their employer does not allow them to work remotely in the future.

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This is a major challenge for IT departments, which need to provide access to the ever-increasing amounts of data stored in a company's datacenter. Whereas at the start of the pandemic employees were willing to wait to access data, now working from home they want to access it as quickly as if they were working in an office. To ensure secure and efficient access to data, administrators must monitor both the performance of Internet links and their saturation by VPN connections. It is also important to monitor the most frequently used resources and prioritise such traffic accordingly in order to improve the efficiency of data transmission (QoS).

2. Fewer face-to-face meetings and more online meetings

Organising meetings using tools such as Zoom or MS Teams is an everyday occurrence for most people. This trend is necessitated both by the pandemic situation and quarantines and by the cost and time savings for meetings that can be held remotely.  For the quality of remote meetings, the quality and smoothness of the video and audio are of the utmost importance. In the long run, nobody will attend meetings that cannot be understood, where participants have to repeat their statements several times. To ensure the highest quality, it is necessary to ensure the lowest possible latency and packet loss. Monitoring these parameters and not just bandwidth is the key to successful online meetings.

3. Cyber security is still important

Although the topic is not widely covered in the media, the number of attacks on networks and information systems is steadily increasing. Not only is the number of attacks increasing, but also the costs to the attacked institutions. Whether a company decides to suffer losses or pay the ransom, the cost of attacks is increasing. It is therefore becoming good practice to prevent and detect attacks early in order to minimize their costs. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure! As the main vector of attacks at the moment is the network, it is worth focusing on monitoring this aspect. Tools such as FlowControl XNS help you non-invasively monitor network traffic and detect anomalies based on both suspicious behaviour and lists of suspicious IP addresses.

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