Connectivity has been one of the core concerns in 2020 for businesses, individuals, and nations alike. Isolated by pandemic-induced lockdowns, the year saw people as well as organisations — including those who were hitherto tech-celibates — coming online to stay connected with the world. This paradigm shift resulted in a large-scale overlapping of professional and domestic spheres, as social distancing became a mandate and remote work a necessity.

As the world enters a brand-new decade, here’s looking at some of the top business connectivity trends that includes technological developments and are most likely to find industry-wide application in 2021.

Enterprisation of the home

Companies have started thinking about the long-term strategies to support a permanent work from home culture. Remote working is not a recent invention. However, it is only in 2020 that it became not only the “normal” but the only way of doing business. This trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future — at least until everybody is inoculated and physical commute to office becomes safe again. However, even after the viral outbreak is relegated to history, remote working will continue to be a mainstay of the post-pandemic business reality.

Why? Because businesses are now familiar with the cost and flexibility benefits of the remote working set-up and they will continue to tap into its potential to drive employee productivity and satisfaction. Leading corporations have already begun their transition to a permanent or hybrid remote working model.

To establish a fully functional remote or hybrid work set-up, companies need a reliable connection that can support bandwidth-intensive applications. 2020 already saw enterprises opting for robust business connectivity solutions to enable their employees to stay connected and collaborate remotely on the back of digital tools and resources such as videoconferencing platforms.

The coming year will see this development’s next stage of evolution — a transformation being referred to as the ‘enterprisation of the home.’ As the term suggests, companies are now not only thinking in terms of enabling work from home for their employees but also to convert their homes into enterprise-grade, secure workplace environments.

The idea is to enable professionals to use enterprise critical applications in a safe and secure way from their homes. The year 2021 will see the business ecosystem taking a preliminary step in this direction as organszations are under greater pressure to digitise services quickly to scale up to meet rising customer demands, to drive operational efficiency, to improve business processes and to create new revenue channels.

Towards an omnichannel approach

Brands have been moving towards an omnichannel communication strategy for the past few years, but the rate of adoption was slow, at best. After 2020, when the virtual presence of customers has assumed greater significance in the wake of minimised physical interaction environment, adopting an omnichannel approach is no longer a luxury — it has become a critical business imperative.

Companies now need to deliver a consistent customer experience across all platforms. A 2019 research shows that omnichannel communication strategies can help brands drive customer loyalty by around 66 per cent and interactions by 44 per cent. Therefore, discerning enterprises will increasingly incorporate a multichannel approach into their marketing and engagement strategies. This will be necessary to not only seamlessly engage with their existing customer base but also to acquire new customers and re-engage lapsed ones.

Big Data, cloud and IoT

It is impossible to discuss digital transformation without talking about the cloud. Modern enterprises are expected to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives by incorporating cloud-hosted platforms and services into their organisational structure. This development will be accompanied with the adoption of Big Data and IoT-based technologies to build efficiencies.

Though IoT, Big Data analytics, and Cloud Computing are three distinct technology domains with overlapping use cases and each of these having its own merits, but all these technologies can complement each other and can create a real good innovation to get the best results. The merging of these cutting-edge technologies can help companies tap into superior decision-making and risk management abilities whiling augmenting the precision and uptime of their business operations.

Cybersecurity solutions

Customers trust businesses with sensitive data. Any instance of cybersecurity breach, network infiltration, or loss of business-critical data then, not only harms companies financially but also damage their brand reputation. Amid the pandemic, the accelerated digital transformation of enterprises coincided with a rise in sophisticated threat campaigns such as phishing and ransomware attacks by cyber-miscreants.

Cybersecurity, therefore, has emerged as a key consideration as businesses endeavour to set up a robust and secure remote working infrastructure.

Against this backdrop, companies have begun focussing on not only network security but also securing all the endpoints connected to the enterprise network by deploying smart AI and cloud-based solutions. Modern businesses are also increasingly leveraging multi-factor authentication to protect the digital infrastructure by restricting remote access to authorized users only.

Companies are also adopting AI-based automation to safeguard the data and privacy of their customers as well as their employees and other stakeholders.

Hybrid voice solutions

The need for scalable, cost-effective, and efficient voice solutions amid the pandemic-hit business landscape reigned supreme this year. As a result, many forward-thinking organisations leaned in favour of integrating SIP-enabled digital voice solutions for business communication. In the coming years, however, when the business landscape is relatively stabilised, companies will look to leverage a strategic combination of analogue and digital voice solutions.

Because both legacy telephony systems enabled by PRI and digital communication set-ups have their own advantages. For instance, digital telecommunication does not rely on hardware upgrade for on-demand capacity increase, making its scaling up (or down) quick and cost-effective. On the other hand, legacy telephony is preferred by enterprises because they are familiar with it.

Therefore, depending on the distinct requirements and budget allocation concerns of different businesses, modern enterprises may seek to utilise the right mix of SIP and PRI-based telephony systems, moving towards a hybrid model in 2021 and beyond.

We are also seeing an increasing adoption of cloud telephony services as SMEs have already started realising the benefits of cloud-based voice services. Few major reasons for their growing inclination towards cloud telephony is IVR, automated database, unlimited minutes, and call recording facility apart from regular I/B & O/B voice services.

VR, the ultimate training tool

Amid the mounting health and hygiene concerns, enterprises as well as individuals are keen on minimising their physical contact environment. In the absence of physical interactions, the demand for technologies that can simulate a real-world environment will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. As AI-based AR/VR technologies become more advanced, they will be increasingly deployed by organisations to remotely drive the L&D, training, and tutorial programmes for the benefit of their employees.

VR technology can enable more effective learning at a lower cost and in less time than many traditional learning methods. This is because VR can allow for more training repetitions that can be done remotely, provides realistic scenarios especially when dealing with costly, rare scenarios that may be too risky to replicate in reality; improves retention and recall. 2021 is poised to mark the year when AR/VR tools will be used to augment collaboration and communication between employees, and for delivering a more immersive experience during meetings and conferences.

The year 2020 has demonstrated that the indispensable need for connectivity and communication can address the uncertainty of the future. No matter what the situation, an organisation’s integrity depends on how — and how well — its stakeholders are connected with each other. Technological innovations will continue to deliver better and smarter connectivity solutions for all. All a modern company needs to do is keep abreast of the latest tech developments and integrate them to stay ahead of the curve. Modern-day enterprises can leverage cutting-edge connectivity trends to connect with superior business opportunities in 2021 and emerge as truly future-ready organisations.

The writer is Senior Vice-President, SME Operations, Tata Teleservices

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