Why Some Succeeded – and Some Struggled – During the Overnight Switch to WFH

“People need to be adaptable to this new environment.”

Charles Ross is Chief Customer Officer at Tanium, a unified endpoint management and security platform.

Ross’ customers include some of the world’s largest and most complex endpoint environments, including all six branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, 12 of the 15 largest U.S. banks, and large-scale healthcare providers.

When the pandemic struck, Ross worked with them through every step of their transition to Work From Home (WFH) environments.

Here’s what Ross learned.

The sudden mandate for a new operating environment

Ross worried that many organizations would not survive this catastrophic change in how they ran their businesses.

He knew they had to rapidly transform their operations, adopt new WFH infrastructure, and upend everything they knew about themselves and their environments—overnight.

Ross instructed his teams to give their customers whatever they needed to make it through the transition in one piece. Together, they made it work, and they brought their customers’ business operations back online.

But Ross also spoke with many organizations that were not his customers, who struggled through the transition—and who still lack effective visibility and control over their new WFH environments.

What separated those who succeeded from those who struggled

Ross saw a distinct difference between companies that had the right tools to maintain visibility and control as their endpoint environments changed, and companies that were “flying blind”.

For companies that find themselves in this challenging position, Ross recommends a few steps. They must change their tooling. They must develop resilience against unexpected events. They must establish flexible systems that can change without re-engineering their entire infrastructure. And they must develop scalable environments that can adapt to any new changes that come their way.

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