UPDATED 13:00 EDT / APRIL 07 2020

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‘Stay-at-home’ puts spotlight on digitally prepared companies over laggards

The changes to society over the past months during the coronavirus pandemic have been unprecedented. As governments around the world recommend social distancing and restrict movement, companies have been forced to quickly adapt. Switching operations to allow employees to work from home and customers to access goods and services online has become priority No. 1.

This presents a challenge, even for digital natives. But for companies lagging behind on the digital transformation curve, conjuring the required infrastructure and procedures out of nothing could be an impossible hurdle to overcome.

“If we have ever been in a place where this sort of transformation is a must, not a slow choice or an evolution, it is now,” said Bruno Kurtic (pictured), founding vice president of product and strategy at Sumo Logic Inc. “Enterprises are not only working remotely, leveraging productivity tools and digital technologies to do work, they’re also serving more customers through their digital properties.”

Kurtic joined John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, for a digital CUBEConversation. They discussed how data analytics can be used to mitigate business disruptions caused by the COVID-19 virus.

Problems with scale and security

The rapid increase in remote workers caused by the shutdown of socialization is pushing existing systems to the max. “Essentially, what’s happening right now, it looks like the business environment demands everybody to be fully digital, but not everybody is,” Kurtic stated.

This is a situation for which Sumo Logic had prepared. “We knew that our business was going to always demand us to be able to respond to both scheduled and unscheduled disruptions, and we needed to build systems that can scale to that without many human interactions,” Kurtic said. 

Sumo Logic has seen customer single-sign-on use jump by 50%, and there has been a 215% increase in views of virtual private network dashboards since the start of the pandemic.

“[Remote work is] putting stress on infrastructure, things like VPNs and networks and things like that, because they’re carrying more bits and bytes,” Kurtic said. “It’s putting stress on productivity tools, things like cloud provider tools, things like Office 365, and Google Drive, and Salesforce, and other things that are now being leveraged more and more as people are remote.”

Cyberattacks are also on the rise as employees log in to work on unsecured networks and devices, and criminals respond to the siren call of societal chaos.

The importance of being digitally prepared

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Some of Sumo’s customers are able to take advantage of the disruption and are actively capturing market share from their less prepared competitors, according to Kurtic. Having agile microservices and architecture that can scale in response to changing traffic patterns is essential in this.

“If you don’t capture [traffic], you miss out on it, and then customers go elsewhere and never come back,” he said.

This puts companies clinging to the traditional way of work at a disadvantage. “The people who are struggling are people who have not yet made it to that full transformation,” Kurtic added.

Successfully adopting cloud infrastructure and solutions is one part of the puzzle. But having scalable architecture is only part of managing the increased load successfully. It also requires understanding what customers and workers need, where the system is failing, and where to implement changes to reduce friction, maximizing the good and minimizing the bad. That understanding comes from data.

Sumo Logic is a specialist in “continuous intelligence,” where data is not collected and stored for leisurely review, but analyzed in a constant stream at near real-time. “You need to mine it for insights in an agile fashion, just like software development,” Kurtic said. “The sooner you understand what the data is telling you, the sooner you can actually respond to whatever that data is telling you.”

To help out during this fast transition time, Sumo Logic has created an out-of-the-box solution for businesses and educational institutions. In addition to SaaS apps to help companies keep critical applications secure and accessible for at-home workers, the bundle includes access to Sumo Logic’s Continuous Intelligence Platform for educators struggling to manage online schooling. A third aspect is Mindset Reset, a series of videos and podcasts designed to address the pressure and fear every one is currently feeling.

The solution is available free for a 90-day trial, allowing enterprise and educational institutions to ramp-up remote operations with no obligation or up-front costs. “We can help them make sure that the things that they do, that they need to do for this remote workforce, remote learning, whatever it might be, is efficient, working and secure,” Kurtic said.

No pain without gain

Right now, the world is in a time of fear and chaos, but when Kurtic looks ahead he sees long-term benefits from the disruption. Instead of the slow transition that was underway, enterprises have been forced to leap into a world where face-to-face meetings and water-cooler gossip is a thing of the past. And once the digital chasm between traditional ways of working and the agile cloud-friendly culture has been bridged, these companies may realize they like it.

“We are going to probably figure out how to travel less, probably figure out how to actually do this more effectively,” Kurtic said. “The cost of doing business is going to go down. The ability to actually find new jobs might broaden, because you might be able to find jobs at companies who never thought they could do this remotely and now are willing to hire remote workforces and people.”

In the end, Kurtic sees society’s current challenges will be good for organizations. “Both the transformation into digitally serving our customers and the transformation toward remote workforce is going to be good for business,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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