2020 was absolutely an unprecedented year. As 2020 boils down to a simmer, we look at what’s in store for the year ahead, and how the learnings of this year will influence 2021. With the 2020 year in review, I look at how the pandemic upended our day to day lives with a widespread impact we haven’t seen in decades. A lot of businesses were left uncertain about the future.

What is certain is how much more reliant IT services have been and will continue to be on their digital strategy, now and especially in the long term. We have found that those who embraced that transformation prior to this year have not only been resilient but some have even thrived. For those in the digital transformation process, the lessons of this year have provided additional insight into its value.

Thankfully, we have the means of modern technology with which some, albeit not all, have access to sustain and support business as usual. As we look back at 2020 with, forgive me, 20/20 hindsight, we’d like to spotlight the trials, tribulations, and triumphs this rollercoaster of a year has delivered. My intent is for this piece to provide insight and retrospection into what the effects of our “new normal” may entail for our immediate future ahead in 2021.

Digital Transformation

No, not that kind of digital transformation so much as a transformation to digital and virtual working. For many of us, last year came down to adapting to “the new normal”. Connectria’s teams, like many organizations, embraced remote work and moved our staff to work remotely without really skipping a beat. We even saw an increase in productivity. Moving almost 200 employees remotely, at the drop of a hat, within a 24 x 7 x 365 operation is no small feat. We did that in record time.

We also enabled similar customer needs from services powering your remote workforce to supporting your business with other remote services. Businesses, big and small alike, pivoted with lightning-fast reflexes to preserve their markets, customers, and livelihood. But even with an ongoing pandemic, a busy election, and countless other distractions, Connectria pressed on as the world turned.

Customer Support

Sometimes, we get stuck in the minutiae of work and we don’t realize the great things that we’re doing. This past year has been incredible with regard to what we were able to accomplish for our customers during the pandemic. When we realized the far-reaching impact of COVID-19, we had to sit back and look at the bigger picture and figure out how to pivot our business model. We asked ourselves a lot of questions like what does this mean for our customers? How can we best support them? What does this mean for us? What needs to change?

First, we addressed our customer concerns and reached out to our existing customers to make sure they were doing ok. Because of our diverse business, there were certainly some customers impacted, such as those serving affected interests and industries like aviation, healthcare supply manufacturing, hospitality, retailers, and more. We worked with them to better evaluate their infrastructure, to give them some better models to help either reduce costs or to become more productive by offering remote work solutions.

In some instances, customers had set up disaster recovery (DR) and that was a place to cut down a little bit. For those doing all of that in their own data centers, the ability to pivot quickly from a cost structure perspective, or a productivity perspective, would have been very difficult. For customers that were already doing business with us, we were able to make responsive changes to really help them get back to their core business and help them survive thanks to the flexibility and agility that we have with our services model.

Partners

We continued supporting our customers and partners in every way we could. This commitment served them as well as it served us. In May, Connectria was awarded an IBM Excellence Award during the first-ever virtual IBM Think conference. IBM’s Excellence Awards recognize IBM Business Partners that demonstrate excellence, drive exceptional client experiences, and promote business growth.

While we are proud to share news of our achievements, our focus day in and day out isn’t any given award, but simply how we can continue to best serve our customers and partners. Our continued ranking as a best place to work in IT is also reflective of these efforts which enables us to maintain a full staff of the best IBM Sys Admins and architectural experts.

Advancing AWS Support

2020 wasn’t just about preservation, it was also focused on growing in new ways to further support customer needs. The Connectria team was very proud to achieve the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Competency status in September, a designation which recognizes that Connectria provides the technical expertise necessary to help customers successfully move to AWS, through all phases of complex migration projects including discovery, planning, migration, and operations. To help create comprehensive business cases and migration plans, we also started providing funded Migration Assessments that takes your application workloads, licenses, and business priorities into consideration to help minimize TCO.

Looking Ahead

Connectria has traditionally helped customers by augmenting existing staff as they retire or turnover. Our in-house solution architects and platform experts handle production workloads and deliver services with capability, not simply hardware. We’re ending 2020 on a high note with our forthcoming hybrid architecture which allows businesses to run IBM Power Systems workloads on-net with AWS. This hybrid solution enables a more simplified path forward-looking at X86 modernization with AWS as opposed to replatforming the Power System platform to run on AWS. By enabling so many new opportunities and possibilities, this solution provides an ideal foundation for longer-term cloud migration goals.

Contact Connectria for more information. As the year quickly wraps up, I want to take a moment and thank you for reading and working with Connectria. All of our writers, solution architects, and experts are grateful that you find value in this publication. We are focused on supporting you, by providing the information you need to make informed decisions. We are proud to be a resource for all things IBM hosting, cloud migration and management, managed and professional services, and more. We look forward to working together in the new year!