By Cenker Ozhelvaci, Vice President of Emerging Markets, Managing Director of Iron Mountain UAE and Turkey

Cenker Özhelvacı, Vice President and General Manager Emerging Markets Iron Mountain

Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies in the UAE had a multi-year digital transformation plan in place, many of which had to be implemented overnight to keep their businesses running.

As life has partially returned to normal in the UAE, with a big rate of the population vaccinated, and significantly eased restrictions, companies are somehow already underway the new post-pandemic reality. 

In the unique and rapidly evolving circumstances, it can be challenging to balance what is best for the company and its employees, while still delivering an excellent customer experience to ensure long-term operational resilience.

It’s critical for companies and IT teams to find the right tools to preserve business continuity in this ‘new normal’. New digital solutions and modern analytics are playing an increasingly critical role.

Companies’ priorities in terms of support for post-COVID digital transformation can be broadly grouped into four critical areas:  

  1. Secure data access for a growing remote workforce

A recent survey showed that a large percentage of professionals across various sectors in the UAE, prefer virtual working environments to remain in the post-pandemic era, signalling that remote working practices are becoming a new normal, despite the fact that prior to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the UAE had one of the lowest remote work participation rates in the world.

In fact, a big share of Iron Mountain customers are reassessing their processes to implement a more permanent solution for combined office-based and remote-working. This means giving remote employees easy and secure access to records and tools to work productively from home and minimising the potential for compliance or cybersecurity issues.

Enabling new ways of working over the longer term, of course, has major implications for IT departments. Fortunately, there are several ways to make this possible. Many technologies allow to quickly transform physical records to digital. These include virtual mailroom service, opening, scanning and distributing mail electronically to remote workers, such as the one provided by Iron Mountain. These tools help companies secure valuable data on corporate devices with services such as image on demand, reducing the reliance on potentially unsecured physical deliveries to home offices. 

2. Adjust physical workplaces to our new reality

While working remotely, space can be a big concern. Unfortunately, there are very few cases where existing office layouts will work from a social distancing perspective, even if part of the workforce works permanently from home. 

For example, Iron Mountain is assisting businesses in freeing-up space by assessing what to store or destroy, identifying records to digitise, providing temporary offsite storage for furniture and IT equipment, and providing offsite file management. 

3. Maintain operational continuity 

The pandemic has revealed gaps in most organisations’ disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Perhaps most importantly, it has highlighted a need to reduce our reliance on physical locations, provide new kinds of support for remote employees, and facilitate work asynchronously across multiple time zones. 

 It is currently critical for companies to maintain a robust operational continuity and emergency response plan, ensuring they are equipped to prosper and maintain a healthy workforce in this new reality. 

It is important for companies to implement a more rigorous approach to risk management and ensure this is an integral part of their strategy moving forwards. Some of the services provided by Iron Mountain range from helping companies develop a comprehensive business continuity and emergency response plan, to updating data management strategy and automating workflows, strengthening data protection and IT security, and ensuring compliance with regulatory obligations. Iron Mountain also conducts advanced data mining with the help of Machine Learning tools to uncover new revenue stream opportunities and cost savings.

4. Strengthen supply chains

Over the past year, many organizations dependent on a supply chain have experienced disruptions never before encountered. In some instances, demand for goods has exceeded supply chain capacity, whilst in others inventory has accumulated as production was interrupted, slowed or diverted to essential products. This meant that some businesses lacked the warehouse workers, transportation drivers and space to store inventory. Here again, Iron Mountain was able to help with solutions that help customers manage critical inventory with security, scale and speed. The services which have been most popular include receipt of stock directly from suppliers, inventory pick-up and delivery to and from customer sites, and temporary storage of excess inventory.

For further information on the support available to help accelerate digital transformation see Iron Mountain’s online guidance: https://www.ironmountain.ae/