These days are among the toughest days for any economy. This Global pandemic created very challenging situations for the whole world and everyone is struggling to manage their possibilities. It’s not only about health issues, but also managing the economy, which might observe major impact post lockdown. The COVID-19 crisis will leave great learning for all of us. Indore based Vibs Infosol is a leading channel partner focussing on the Central and Western markets of India.
Anoop Singh, VP – Business Development, Vibs Infosol speaks on how their organization fought the challenges of this pandemic both internally and externally. Edited excerpts.
How did enterprises you handle react to the lockdown and how much was their acceptance towards ‘work from home'(WTF)?
In the past, post-Mumbai Floods, everyone had started considering Business Continuity very seriously. All customers had adopted High Availability as a mandate for their design and architecture. Similarly, during this panic situation, most industries across vertical have understood the real meaning of Agility. During any disaster, we always strive to take care of our assets. Since we consider employees and Customers as our real assets, we need to stand with them in these unprecedented times. Applying the policy of WFH and allowing everyone to connect to work safely is the prime concern for all customers. Customers had really taken this challenge
positively and mostly managed safe connectivity to all their workforce.
What were the challenges you faced during transforming them towards the new model? Share a few interesting incidents.
Now, We had multiple used cases to manage Agility without much downtime. There were challenges for WFH with complete Data Protection, Employee monitoring, Endpoint management, a collaboration tool for Audio and Video conference, migrating to the Cloud environment for future-ready are few important factors every customer is looking for. Today, early adopters had already implemented the majority of them, and followers are soon back on track.
One of our premium customers had a similar issues to manage their call centre environment since they had only a centralized environment with desktop at majority Endpoint to manage compliances perfectly. They are in essential services deliverable and had compliances to manage any situation. Post lockdown, they had sudden panic mode to deliver and manage the BCP. We had not only provided them immediate safe WFH environment but also make them ready to manage similar factors through a cloud environment, Safe VPN connectivity, Endpoint, and compliance management for critical data repository, Employee productivity measurement & monitoring. They are Happy customers for us now and we look forward to new things to discuss with them in the coming days.
SATCOM- MASTER DISTRIBUTORS FOR SOPHOS
What were the key industry verticals you are handling and what are the sectors that were very quick to adopt and how are they working now?
We have a strong presence across all verticals. We strongly operate and connect with Large Enterprises, Corporates, SME, and Government verticals. We are serving more than 300 customers. Major customer belongs to BFSI, IT / ITES, Manufacturing, Education, and Government vertical. Most of them are having essential services. They had involved us from their basic requirement to all critical and compliance-based opportunities. We had strongly delivered them mostly all services what they needed in these difficult times and that’s where they are feeling more secure with us and operating with 100% capacity with a flexible environment now.
What were the key challenges in cybersecurity and how Vibs infosol had addressed them?
Security is always an important concern raised by customers. They have a major responsibility to provide data accessibility while managing all possible controls. It is also important for them to ensure the safety of data at all levels, whether it is from internal threats or mishandling of data. Ensuring the actual data availability and securing it is what every customer wants to talk about. Our enterprise customers were earlier more concerned about perimeter security and basic endpoint management solution; however, with the sudden rise in cyber threats and different attack patterns, they are now looking for endpoint threat management suite,
including anti-malware, anti-ransomware, EDR, MDR, APT, encryption, anti-phishing and many more. We also ensure that their data is well backed up and secured both at the central location and end-point.
With work from home has almost become a habit, what are the new challenges evolving, and how IT is expected to enable them?
As we all know, WFH (Work from Home) is new normal and most companies want to maintain social distancing and complete hygiene to their workplace. Some companies have started partial operational hours with a limited workforce. Major challenges are to manage compliances and security with complete connectivity and optimal productivity. Large enterprises were initially concerned about major connectivity factors but lately, they understood and realized concerns from Audit and other relevant departments about security protocol and compliance.
Our major services comprise of managing security for customers’ centralized environment and end-user threat management. Deployment of cloud and secured VPN connectivity would be required, for which, we already have multiple and proven technologies in place. Additionally, we have certified resources and strong customer references wherein our solutions have helped them create a flexible work environment while maintaining all customer-relevant concerns.
Once the unlock is opened, what are your predictions towards the IT investments that will move?
We strongly feel that the time will change soon and people will be back in the regular operations. They have put their CAPEX on hold due to the unforeseen challenges most organizations are facing. Managing OPEX and overheads are primary concerns. Most of the IT teams and management had differed their procurement for an uncertain times. They are presently working on the ‘Must-to-have’ factor only. Soon, we are hoping, the good times will be back for all of us and we all would be back to our regular business routines. However, there are organisations who had already postponed and planned all their major projects for the second half-yearly financial terms.
How, as an organization you are poised to grow, post lockdown?
At the outset, we always wanted to be known as customers’ preferred technology services partner. With this aim in mind, we have always been investing in enhancing our engineers’ knowledge and improving skillsets within the organisation. Moreover, we have created a robust IT environment and keep on evolving new technology alignments, which is valued by our customers.
We are utilizing this period to refresh organizational processes in terms of creating robust customer support mechanism and focusing on employees’ learning curve, so that they are well-prepared to address all challenges that might crop up in the future. We have already started put a ticketing-based service desk to ensure enhanced customer support within the stipulated time frame. Over the past few years, we have been providing 24×7 support to our customers. In the current scenario, the focus is more on formulating and structuring the support team mechanism that will enable us to promptly respond to the customer requirements.