Technology
Infrastructure and security Remote working could have been accommodated as an occasional occurrence with the correct infrastructure in place. You could probably connect to email easily and access services on the corporate network with a VPN. This was designed with the intention that, in the next few days or weeks, you would be going back into the office and, once on the company network, happily getting your Windows security updates and resetting your password that had expired. However, following a number of lockdowns, months
went by with people working remotely and new ways to manage and monitor all these employees working from home was needed. IT departments did not know if the computers were getting patched, or if passwords were expiring and could not be easily reset. At the same time, VPNs increasingly became more of a risk than a security as the bad guys figured out how to use this as an attractive attack vector when everyone was working from home. This was a golden moment for cloud infrastructure services to make their appearance and accelerate their deployment. Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (in the cloud) offered a way to manage company devices that were not on corporate networks anymore, and its Virtual Desktop gave a cloud-based alternative to VPNs. These may have been short-term, reactionary options to solve an immediate need, but the long- term benefits are real. Deploying these cloud services offered flexibility and mobility in a way that was not possible before, without compromising on security. In fact, once you coupled this with a cloud-based multifactor authentication (MFA), you were actually increasing your security posture.
Enterprise platforms So, we tackled the infrastructure and security aspect with cloud – but what about the enterprise
Hotel Management International /
www.hmi-online.com
platforms you still needed to access during travel restrictions? Not so easy and not so fast. These platforms are big, lumbering giants of things like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), omnichannel in call centres, or productivity and collaboration platforms. Changing these required a lot of planning from a lot of departments, a healthy budget and a generous portion of buy-in.
Now is the opportunity for hotels to dive in and try cloud functions to help create a safer guest experience.
“VPNs increasingly became more of a risk than a security as the bad guys figured out how to use this as an attractive attack vector when everyone was working from home.”
Let us focus on call centres for a moment. If your
call centre was not already cloud-enabled, your agents were essentially tethered to the office, they needed access to the corporate network for the local telephone system and access to reservations and property management systems. This made for a complicated situation when remote work became a requirement, even if most of the calls were for cancellations instead of reservations. Again, this was the perfect moment to introduce
cloud services for telephone and omnichannel, and free your agents so they could work anywhere with an internet connection. These cloud services could give a level of flexibility not previously possible with local platforms, so organisations could remain agile and react as the Covid-19 waves kept coming and regulations governing working from home kept changing.
Hospitality applications Finally, we come to the hospitality applications used, not only by our associates, but also by our guests.
27
zhu difeng/
Shutterstock.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73
