After several weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak, I like to categorize the business in three different categories...

• The businesses in the first category are 100% utilized with the current situation. They probably did not have a suite bale Home office solution like VDI or Remote Apps or so before and now they are struggling with providing this service. In many cases they don’t care about security anymore, GDPR is something not even considered in their short-term solutions. IT is just in panic mode – there is no room and time for updates or improvements.
• The second category businesses had a work from home solution in place, they just needed to expand it a little. Probably they run an oversubscription, making it not 100% performing well, but good enough for most of the people to work from home. Unfortunately, many of this category business are running with reduced working hours, so they just barely manage to keep severity running. There is no time for improvement or bigger updates. All projects are postponed until the crisis is under control.
• The last category businesses also have a EUC solution in place and are able to operate it at a reduced, but good enough pace. Even if they are working with reduced working hours, they see the necessarily to update their environments on a regularly basis and additionally – and that’s what’s really separates them from the rest – they see in this crisis also a chance to do better. With people working from home, this is probably a good time to work on some parts the company network infrastructure – as you don’t interfere with people working from there. Another example I saw is that everybody now sees the value of a good EUC architecture. So the IT takes their chance and tries to get more budget for a more solid / better EUC infrastructure, as now – where everyone relies on it – getting budget for EUC is easier than ever.

As a result, I can see that category three business continue to evolve their infrastructure and are even setting up new projects – a benefit – as now you are able to find enough proper external resources to help you. Once the crisis is over, I truly believe that these businesses are stronger than before.

The second category businesses will start going back to normal once the crisis is over. They will probably need a couple of days / weeks to reschedule all their projects, but then they will try to catch up as soon as possible. While this is generally a good idea, I expect that we will have tight external resources at that time – so expect a delay and a fight for resources.

The last business category will probably need even longer as the second category to get back to normal business. They first need to figure out how to get compliant again and plan a new and better architecture for the future. This all takes time and as they don’t have experience in how to deliver a successful remote work experience. So, I expect them to be very late at the party which will result in longer waiting and processing times. For some Businesses this will take so long, that they don’t even remember the crisis anymore (typical behavior – everything older than 6 month never happened) and probably cut down budget or even cancel projects as they don’t see a value anymore in them.

Summarizing it up, I can see a huge workload coming up once the crisis is over. Please don’t be a category one business and at least start a bit of planning for upcoming projects right now. So that – from an EUC perspective – we can say we are exiting the crisis stronger than before.

‍