It is hard to believe that we are going into our fourth year of living with COVID. We all remember when in March 2020, the lockdowns hit the world. First, we were told that we would just have to stay home for two weeks. Most businesses could handle that. But two weeks later, businesses learned that “15 days to stop the spread” was simply not going to be a reality. CEOs and business owners scrambled to get their employees home for a longer haul. They needed VPNs, cloud software, virtual access, and work-from-home solutions galore. Businesses that had not adopted a cloud strategy had to make quick decisions without the benefit of time to do a thorough vetting of the vendors (or at a minimum as thorough as a normal vendor evaluation pre-pandemic). Three years after the lockdown, we’ve realized that many businesses made bad choices in those initial months out of panic and necessity. Now, in 2023, it is time to reevaluate the technology you have and what your business needs. 

4 truths about technology 2020

Let’s start with four realities of technology in 2020 that we worked through and hope to learn from.

• Virtually no one had a 100% VPN strategy in February 2020. We even heard stories that people were waking up at 4am to log onto the corporate VPN and then go back to sleep.
• Premise-based anything was a problem, partly because we were at home and partly because of the VPN issue above.
• Zoom and MS Teams adoption skyrocketed with some businesses choosing to have both options, because colleagues preferred one over the other.
• Best-effort residential ISPs were pushed to the brink. Working from home, online classes, Fortnite, Zoom happy hours, Alexa telling us our notifications and binge-watching Netflix showed us how good (or bad) our home WIFI really was.

All of this meant businesses might not select the best technology, or they had redundancies in technology, or they were simply paying too much or for more than they needed. But desperate times called for desperate measures, right? Well, the times are not so desperate anymore.

Looking forward to technology solutions in 2023.

Now that we looked back for a moment, let’s look forward to 2023.  Since most technology agreements are based on 36-month terms, 2023 presents an opportunity to evaluate your anything cloud infrastructure to determine the following:

• Does this cloud strategy still work for our needs?
• Can we optimize what we have for better cost efficiencies?
• Can hybrid or multi-cloud options improve application performance?
• What workloads belong where?
• Do you have cloud – phones, storage, back up/DR, desktops, servers, firewalls, or anything else that you want to see if it still makes sense?

ProfitComm can show you options so you can optimize your cloud spend while improving cloud performance. Our RFP Alternative brings the best options to your doorstep with minimal effort on your IT resources. We use custom software and AI combined with decades of industry knowledge to eliminate the cumbersome traditional RFP. You still get to make the decision that works best for your company, but we help get you there faster and at a fraction of the cost. 

Additionally, our Tech Check Audit can take a look at many different areas of your technology spend. We benchmark what you are spending against the current pricing models, look for pricing anomalies, and/or find areas where you can do more with less.

Click the button below to schedule a time where we can have a conversation about how we can help you right size and right spend your cloud based solutions.