A TEST OF RESILIENCE

In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic lockdowns, IT teams and CIOs were called upon to rise to the occasion, enable remote working and manage those operations. The most difficult passage of time has also perhaps been their finest hour, in demonstrating their value to their organizations.

- By R. Narayan

It has been one of the toughest years for mankind in recent decades, courtesy the ongoing pandemic. The challenge continues as mankind awaits an effective vaccine to put the threat behind. Needless to add then that in the early months of the lockdown, Businesses were impacted severely. However, even as they couldn’t get people down to their workplaces, Technology provided the solution to connect and transact Business. The collaboration software tools for work from anywhere as well as other remote tools for network configuration to monitoring ensured that people in roles that used computers at work could carry on despite the unprecedented disruption. However, for those who had to be physically available at workplaces or on duty such as field staff, they did have a disruption in their work schedules, until there was partial relaxation and a return to work was possible with all social distancing norms followed. The world continues to cope with the pandemic, with social distancing being followed.

For Technology CIOs, it has been a year to step up and they have done so admirably. Their role has never been more pronounced as has been this year. The companies who had implemented digital transformation even partially, were better placed than those who lagged behind in digital ways.

The CIO had to be up to the challenge during the early days of the lockdown, in terms of overseeing the remote work arrangements. For the Lulu Group, the IT team has to meet the steep demand of supporting the Lulu Group’s vast scale of operations.

Piyush Kumar Chowhan, Group CIO LuLu Group International says “COVID is a unique disruption which I believe no one was prepared in early part of 2020. It was a shock which has provided great learning for all enterprises in the area of strategy and working culture. The CIO’s office had to step up and play a very different role to support the busines teams. IT teams had to respond quickly to enable remote working and ensure business continuity. Since we had already started our cloud journey and invested in remote working technologies, which helped us respond better. The only challenge was the speed of implementation which tested the agile ways of working of IT teams. It was evident that as the situation evolved with multiple lockdowns, there would be a need to accelerate the pace of change for application features and enabling the underlying infrastructure.”

For the Gulftainer Company, a privately owned, independent port management and 3PL logistics company, Remote working and work from home were not new as the Gulftainer IT team has been providing support to their port operations 24/7 spread across various geographies. However, this was a situation on a larger unprecedented scale.

Vinay Sharma, Group IT head, Gulftainer Company says, “Managing with 100% of our office based staff working remotely meant that we did face a few challenges; mainly team timings; isolating in the home environment where there may be internet issues; having to conduct all meetings which used to be daily face to face meetings or discussions across different time zones.”

He adds, “However, the team was able to quickly adapt to the new work norms, many of us created an office room/space to ensure that we were able to focus on work during business hours and not get distracted by family and children. Another challenge was to Shabeer Mohammed VP, Head- Tecchnology ensure everyone maintained a proper work/life balance. In the beginning of the lockdown we found that our teams were spending long hours working without the routine of coming and going Services, GEMS Education to the office. With the help of regular one to ones with staff, team meetings, HR broadcasts and online collaboration tools, we are now very well adjusted to this new normal.”

For the diversified Bin Dasmal Group, the situation prompted a rethink at the strategic and operational levels.

Umesh Moolchandani, Group IT Head, Bin Dasmal Group said, “The unprecedented situation, forced the organization to rethink the business strategy and the operating environment. The top leadership and managers of the group engaged with employees and IT team to respond to the situation considering the government’s guidelines, health and security of the employees and reducing the impact on the business. The IT teams was relied upon to create work-from-home setups for entire group companies.”

The role of IT teams in business continuity had never been seen as more important than during this tough passage of time. For IT teams, this was the moment of reckoning and they had to deliver. Umesh adds, “The IT department in consultation with business and as per the organization policies implemented the right infrastructure e.g. VPN, communication and collaboration tools, data backup tools based on the remote environment of each employee. Employees working with unstructured data were encouraged not to store their files on their own laptops, but rather to store work files on a company-managed file server that had immutable snapshots capability. Having taken these steps, IT department ensured that mission-critical data and applications were fully backed up.”

There were beneficial outcomes as well during this period. For instance, with people hardly stepping out in the months of March to May, e-Commerce got a massive boost in the region. Online retail began to flourish and possibly this is sustainable growth.

Piyush adds, “Internet commerce got a big boost hence it was necessary to scale the e-com business to deliver to the customer expectations. The technology team had to gear up to immediately to offer multiple modes of delivery for our customers like Click and Collect, Express Delivery etc. Use of modern devops tools did help the team develop functionality at a pace not seen before”

Remote working necessitated adoption of new technologies in addition to whatever was already in place. Companies made investments in various tools including collaboration suites and security.

Piyush says, “As response to COVID it was necessary that we provide seamless working condition for all our staff remotely. This required new VDI installations for about 30% of the staff to enable work from home. These were provisioned in cloud very quickly and the transition was near seamless. While a lot of staff were not using lot of collaboration tools, immediate training was provided to them to quickly upskill for better collaboration tools like online calls, virtual chats, common file sharing platforms etc.”

Companies, large and small, had to orient a majority of their staff, to the new way of remote working, familiarizing them with various collaboration tools. This has been a baptism by fire of sorts for a large number of people to digital working but that’s been a positive outcome.

Vinay says, “From Gulftainer’s perspective many of these online tools and collaboration platforms were already in place and in use, throughout our global offices, prior to the pandemic. These were largely being utilized by managers and senior management, howPiyush Kumar Chowhan Group CIO LuLu Group International

ever, with the new working practices we’ve had to adopt, we were able to transition all staff on to these platforms to enable them to more easily work from home. In my view this was a bigger task for us rather than bringing in new tools. We had to conduct training to all people below management level on the use of these tools like MS teams, VPNs, and SharePoint to ensure that all business teams remained productive and able to deliver their KPIs.”

The Bin Dasmal Group too ramped up on their IT infrastructure side.

Umesh says, “To cope with the challenges of remote working, the IT team in Bin Dasmal Group had to bring in various new technologies to support the business. The IT department managed digital devices entrusted to employees using key enabling technologies. Bin Dasmal Group had been already using Email Services, ERP and CRM Application deployed on cloud-based infrastructure to access remotely. Microsoft Teams was primarily used for communication and collaboration between employees, management and other outside parties. Finally, Firewall based VPN provided a secure communication channel through public Internet connections.”

Making the best of the digital initiatives The organizations which had rolled out digital transformation initiatives prior to the outbreak were better placed as they just had to make an incremental adjustment in terms of scaling up their remote work support.

Vinay Sharma Group IT head, Gulftainer Company

collaboration platforms in place due to our global business units, expanding that facility to many more departments and people was the task in hand. As part of our digital transformation initiatives we had already adopted MS team, cloud hosting and e-meeting tools, which were already in use by management and our executive teams, have now been rolled out across all employees at all sites. “

However, he adds that Gulftainer’s other digital transformation initiatives have been impacted because of directing time, manpower and resources towards expanding these collaboration tools and platforms in the organization. “The transformation process has slowed, down if not paused in some areas, due not only our own internal challenges, but also to challenges being faced by our various suppliers, vendors and partners having to cope with similar changes in their own organizations,” he says.

For Lulu, this seems to have created an opportunity to accelerate omnichannel retail.

Piyush says, “We were already on the digital transformation path and we believe that this pace will be accelerated and some of our plans of creating omni-channel retail for our customers. While COVID has brought in new customer behavior, we are working to understand the trends and build out customer proposition accordingly. We will keep on investing more on customer facing technologies to understand them better and serve them better.”

The Bin Dasmal Group was also quite ahead in terms of adopting transformation technologies. This has stood the company in good stead and kept it resilient.

Umesh says, “Bin Dasmal Group has been one of the early adopters of the cloud-based technologies. The organization had taken up digital transformation initiatives and deployed IT services like emails, business critical applications like ERP and CRM in the cloud environment. Even while deploying these services in the cloud, the IT department had taken good care of security in designing and setting up the network environment, protocols, policies and procedures. Any new initiative, whether it’s technology refresh, business application upgrade or any new technology deployment, the IT department follows the security by design and makes sure that it’s taken up with utmost priority in Bin Dasmal Group.”

Ramping cloud strategies On the infrastructure front, companies that adopted cloud strategies have been able to manage the niggles of operations in these tough times better with the ability to scale up.

Piyush says, “We always believed in hybrid cloud strategy which helps manage out workloads better. We have out large core enterprise applications hosted in our data center and customer facing applications hosted on cloud. This strategy has provided us flexibility and security to manage them very differently. The enterprise workloads are more predictable hence the on-premise solutions are better managed in-house.”

Large companies have relied on a hybrid strategy because that continues to serve them well in terms of scale of operations and also ensuring data integrity.

Vinay says, “We have embarked on our cloud journey few year back , many of our applications and DR sites are on cloud. However, we still have a considerable load hosted on local Data centre. With the recent availability of cloud-based options in the UAE, more applications that are mission critical and response driven can now be moved onto the cloud.”

Bin Dasmal group has also been an adopter of cloud services and the group has deployed a hybrid cloud strategy like several of its peers in the market.

Umesh says, “Bin Dasmal Group, being an early adopter of cloud computing, has embraced the cloud to be the digital enterprise. However, this has been a process driven with caution and based on merits. The organization has adopted the Hybrid cloud environment which includes a mixed computing, storage, and services environment made up of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud.”

Addressing security concerns Enabling remote work meant serious concerns of vulnerabilities being exposed to cyberattacks. Security indeed continues to be a serious subject of focus for all companies that have enabled remote work.

Piyush says, “Security is an important topic and in this digital era requires special attention. Its seen, with more transactions moving contactless and digital the chances of fraud are increasing which is an area of focus for us. Remote working provided us

to revisit the entire network infrastructure and identify potential areas of vulnerability for possible threats. We also did multiple rounds of VAPT to ensure that we are create secure connections as most of our data was being accessed remotely. We are gearing us to protect not only enterprise IT transactions but also ensure that customer interactions happen in a totally secure way.”

For a maritime company like Gulftainer, security has always been a paramount focus and this has been accentuated during the current phase.

Vinay says, “Yes, like any other organization, due to having to work from home, most of our devices are connecting from private networks to our core applications and network components, which in itself is vulnerable and prone to attacks. Recent increased attacks on maritime companies is making the situation even tougher and mandates strict security restrictions Gulftainer has a very strong security framework and policies in place, we are ISO 27001 certified and constantly keep updating our defenses to ensure that our systems and business is protected. We have two independent teams that run the NOC and SOC to monitor all event proactively and ensuring that our platforms remain safe.”

Coping with the cultural change One of the challenges was to see how employees made the adjustments to a near overnight change from working in offices to working out of their homes. And certainly, not all job roles could be done remotely but companies went all out to enable as much remote working possible as they could.

Piyush says, “The biggest change which we see of COVID is in the culture and ways of working. Initially with all the teams working remotely it took time to adapt to this new reality but slowly it became clear that this is the new norm. It surely has made a few employees not so comfortable but most of them were able to adopt this new way of working. The use of remote calls, meeting and collaboration was put to test and helped in having the toolset used by all the employees who were not using them precovid. During the months of April to June the entire workforce was working remotely and then slowly they were brought back into office in phased manner. The other aspect of culture has been agile ways of working which is more prevalent than pre-covid. The adoption of devops for technology and prototyping is going to adopted at a much faster pace across the organizations.”

The organizations guided their employees through the awkward phase when they were required to move to new tools at work swiftly, which was key to making the transition successful.

“It took a few days for employees to brace and handle the change towards remote working. The IT team evaluated the remote working environment of each employee on case-to-case basis and making it secure enough to access the enterprise IT services. Based on the approval provided by the business, the setup for remote working was enabled for the employee. Apart from enabling various IT services for the employees to work remotely, there was a requirement to provide proper awareness and training to the employees. Each and every employee was given the training regarding accessing the IT services securely and contacting the IT team immediately in case of encountering an unforeseen incident.” Umesh Moolchandani Group IT Head, Bin Dasmal Group

Some sectors were exempted from the lockdown rules, Maritime being one of them.

Vinay says, “Initially we transitioned 100% of our white collar/ office based staff to work remotely. However, our core terminal operations staff had to continue working from our port sites, as our business is classed as an essential part of supply chain industry. Our business was always exempt from lock down to ensure we were able to get vital supplies to medical facilities, first responders and into stores.”

As restrictions have eased in the various countries in which it operates, Gulftainer has been able to transition more people back to the office. Currently in the UAE, it is working on a 30% occupancy basis, in line with UAE government regulations and is being seen most companies.

Vinay adds that critical services staff and support staff working are working on a rotation basis to ensure that there is an IT team available for any support needed either by office or home-based staff.

While people have made adjustments, the heart of the matter is that the world is well served by technology in these trying times. When the Pandemic becomes a thing of the past, hopefully sooner than later, the world would have already embraced newer digital technologies, helping to redefine a ‘new normal’. Companies of the region in general are also keeping pace with digital transformation initiatives that seems quite a necessity now to stay resilient.