COVID-19: The Digital Divide Drives Inequities in Virtual Learning

A. DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• With 872 million students relying on some form of virtual learning this academic year, lack of access to reliable technology for some is translating into an academic disaster for millions.
• While the pandemic drags on, observers are urging a concerted effort to fill in technology gaps to support all students as schools work to find a safe path back to physical school.

COVID-19 sent billions of students into a new virtual reality as schools in 192 countries closed their doors. At the pandemic’s peak, 1.6 billion students were impacted. Even the most well-funded school systems struggled to adjust, with technology platforms that faltered. In poorer systems, the lack of technology and connectivity meant many students’ education for the year effectively ended in March.

The Emergence of Central Policy Driven Network and Security Convergence

R. Muru

Summary Bullets:

• The majority of network traffic in future digitalized enterprise environments will be outside the enterprise data center.

• Network and security will converge, with central orchestration and policy controls through the ‘as a Service’ delivery model.

The last ten years have seen CIOs proactively prepare their businesses in the modern era by embracing technology. Digitalization continues to make head way as businesses rework their business models and create new services in innovative ways. These include enabling mobile devices to support new services, digitalizing processes, and making use of remote intelligent devices (with data being pushed closer to the edge device) in sectors like manufacturing. In terms of technology maturity, modern digital environments will increase the use of cloud architectures running vendor applications like Salesforce, Zoom, and Office365, enabling big data and artificial intelligence (AI) in centrally configured data centers that now sit outside the enterprise environment. In addition, the growth of any place/any device/any setting, private networks (including 5G), and edge computing, is driving data away from the enterprise data center and closer to the user/device in a distributed manner. Subsequently, from a network and security perspective traditional network and security architectures fall short. Additionally, due to the uptake of cloud applications, the majority of data traffic terminates at public cloud services and branch offices rather than in enterprise private data centers.

What Do Businesses Need to Do to Support Homeworkers?

G. Barton

Summary Bullets:

• In COVID-19 times and the aftermath, enterprises need to think about both collaboration and connectivity.
• Businesses should consider talking to their telecoms and/or IT providers about developing a new digital transformation strategy.

The COVID-19 crisis looks set to carry on into at least the early part of 2021, and with new restrictions coming into place in many countries to prevent a ‘second wave,’ many employees and employers could easily be facing another six months of staff working from home. Furthermore, many large global enterprises have already indicated that homeworking will be the norm for the long term. So, how should enterprises respond?