Christopher Richard, MD & Chief Software Architect, G7 CR Technologies explains how the company is coping with the ‘new normal’ during the Covid-19 pandemic and what they plan to sustain and grow businesses. The cloud provider has been supporting its customers in their digital transformation journey by charging zero fees for tech transformation assignments.
The current Covid-19 crisis is a good example of the unpredictability of the world we live in. For many large companies the greatest learning is that businesses need to work with a mind-set or make it a way of business by digitising, adapting and changing to new technology innovations rather than when pushed to do so by circumstances. Post Covid-19, most companies, big and small, will move employees to work from home, by giving them secure controlled desktops hosted in the cloud.
Providing secure remote work environment has opened several opportunities for cloud providers like G7 CR Technologies, which is helping customers to continue with minimal infrastructure and people in office. However, the social isolation that is created with working from home are aspects the company is working on and looking for more innovation and progress on the same.
CRN India spoke to Christopher Richard, MD & Chief Software Architect, G7 CR Technologies who explains how they are coping with the ‘new normal’ during the Covid-19 pandemic and what they plan to do going forward, “Mature organisations have already made decisions and so have we that the way of working will change and we are already reorganising ourselves to align with the changes in work, workflows and processes. Organisation leaderships will now sit down to make this more structured and process driven and work out changes necessitated by Covid-19, a permanent and seamless one. In the next few months, our focus is on simply streamlining the new norm and ensuring all activities can function with zero to minimal physical presence. We are also having a dedicated focus on negating the social isolation and emotional impact this change can have on the great team of people that work with us.”
When asked about how WFH and security can go hand in hand, he replies, “We along with all other companies need to adopt to the changing paradigm and adapt a security posture where the perimeter is no longer your data centre alone. The new perimeter isn’t defined by the physical location(s) of the organisation, it now extends to every access point that hosts, stores, or accesses corporate resources and services. Today, organisations need a new security model that more effectively adapts to the complexity of the modern environment, embraces the mobile workforce, and protects people, devices, applications, and data wherever they are located. This is the core of Zero Trust. We have been working with all our customers on the security posture and have taken up Microsoft CASB as our main focus to secure them from these threats.”
Enabling remote workforce
A Microsoft partner for the past four years sees strong sentiments among its customers to remain on the cloud or to move more infra to the cloud. But the biggest focus has been to move the desktops to the cloud, to enable a secure corporate managed desktop in use while the workforce is no longer present within the boundaries of the office walls. There has been an aggressive demand for speedy and stable implementations.
“Organisations need things moving at lightning speed to ensure business continuity and we have been the partner of choice for many. G7 CR alone has moved over 7500+ users’ desktops to the cloud and enabled secure work from home environments for them.”
Additionally, the partner helped the Covid-19 impacted customers and supported them with zero fees for implementations, extended credit terms for the next six months, quick optimisation of cloud resources to reduce spend and in some cases are working with zero margins to further support these customers during their hard times.
Filling skills gap for customers
In terms of technology and business, customers are definitely facing multiple challenges. Some of the tech challenges have been lack of skilled resources to quickly have an unplanned tech transformation. Fall in cash inflows and the great dilemma of whether to spend or reduce spend on tech and people.
Richard says, “We have stepped in and are scaling up our teams to ensure we fill these gaps for our customers and they can now work with our teams like an extended team of their own for the tech transformation. We have ensured that, we charge zero fees for these tech transformation assignments. For us, this is also a mix of a business and social cause. During these trying times, it’s a fact that for us to sustain and grow all businesses need to do so as well.”
