COVID-19: Emerging Technologies and Professional Services to the Rescue

Organizations are scrambling to switch to remote working practices, which is why spending is currently increasing on IT resources and assets, but the speed at which the transition is happening has the potential to create cybersecurity challenges. For example, enterprises that monitor or restrict certain activity – such as highly privileged activities like account creation, deletion and security setting modifications – to on-premises systems are being forced to adapt procedures and enable remote administration. This new remote traffic changes the network baseline, which requires tuning of advanced security analytics platforms that monitor remote traffic. As new baselines are established, these analytics will need regular monitoring and adjustment to spot anomalous, possibly malicious network traffic.

The surge of remote work increases the load on IT support teams, with teleworking users repeatedly contacting helpdesks, creating pressure to skip authentication or authorization steps in order to deal with the increase in call volumes. Furthermore, physical-presence requirements for IT services are no longer feasible; services such as laptop upgrades, certificate issuances or hardware repairs must be deferred. All of these problems can be mitigated by working with professional service providers to augment overstretched internal IT teams.

We, as consumers, are becoming very aware that traditional supply chain structures are optimized for cost, and are not equipped to effectively cope with an increasing number of unplanned disruptions. Both the food and beverage and medical supply sectors urgently need help to boost the resilience of their supply chains. Moving forward, there are professional services firms with domain expertise – familiar with new SaaS products such as Descartes, Cerasis, Ascend, BluJay, Eyefreight and E2Open in the transport management area – that are worth engaging with. Multi-stakeholder environments such as supply chains could become more efficient, resilient and transparent by adopting emerging technologies such as AI and blockchain. Blockchain can essentially provide the needed trust by verifying the identity of things and individuals connected to a network and establishing an immutable record of the provenance information all the way back to the source, without the need for intermediaries that add inefficiencies to the process. Smart contracts play a critical role in formalizing and automating the relationship between individuals, machines or organizations – for example, by ensuring payment of funds upon certain triggering events or imposing financial penalties if certain conditions are not met. AI allows for identification of local trends to reroute goods to the right place based on real-time trend analysis. Being able to process multiple streams of data, with machine learning support, helps deliver more dynamic and timely responses.

Ultimately, we all need the development of a vaccine as quickly and safely as possible. Digital twins offer a data-based approach to a more effective biopharma process control. A digital twin approach combines advanced data analytics and equipment simulation with system models that draw insight from real-time data and historical information. This enables pharmaceutical organizations to simulate a process variation and understand the resulting affects without having to spend months or years in scale production or testing. For example, Atos is a service provider that has already worked with a client in this way to speed up vaccine development. In the current situation, there is scope to use this approach to speed up vaccine development for COVID-19.

Not Forgetting about Social Responsibility 

Social responsibility is a duty that not only falls on individuals and governments, but also on businesses – in this case IT vendors, service providers and other stakeholders. We all have a responsibility to help customers, partners and suppliers maintain business continuity, so we can navigate our way through this crisis and prepare for the new normal.

Many public sector organizations are deploying more virtual agents preconfigured with COVID-19 advice to free up call-center capacity. Medical researchers in many different parts of the world are racing to develop 3-D-printed ventilator parts and masks to plug equipment shortages. Technology startups that have spare software and scanning parts, as well as resin 3-D printers and models, are being asked to come forward. In the UK, this type of initiative is being led by the University of East Anglia, as car manufacturing plants stand by to quickly scale prototyping efforts. The UK government has ordered 10,000 ventilators, to be produced and delivered by Dyson in a matter of weeks. The company's founder said it would pay for a further 5,000, of which 4,000 will be donated to other countries.

Crowdsourcing provider Wipro Topcoder is seeing a rise in demand for its Talent as a Service offering that helps pull resources into an organization's own tools, rapidly creating dedicated remote teams via a VPN. The skills are available globally via platforms such as Topcoder to quickly develop coding solutions to medical problems, and the platform has been successfully used in this way by pharmaceutical giants.

EY has created a microsite that provides insight and recommendations for achieving business continuity and navigating the current disruption. The EY Italy Foundation, in particular, is running a fundraiser – using blockchain technology – through April 3 to support hospitals in Milan and Rome fighting the coronavirus.

451 Research has also put all its COVID-19-related reports outside its paywall to help organizations plan a way through this unfolding challenge – don't hesitate to check them out!