Editor's note, October 2026: This post was written by our US team for Thanksgiving 2020, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and describes how ISEC7 worked at that time. We keep it as a record of that period. For how the digital workplace developed afterwards, read our reviews of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2024.
Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and even though COVID-19 will prevent many families and friends from gathering for the holidays, there is still so much for which we should be thankful.
One thing that comes to mind is how fortunate we are to experience this pandemic in 2020 rather than in 2000, or even 2010. In today's workforce, so much data and information is stored and shared digitally. Had a pandemic hit even 10 years ago, many more late-adopter businesses would have been scrambling to enable remote work, and we would likely have seen even higher unemployment and more businesses folding.
Thankfully, by the dawn of 2020 many businesses had already gone through, or were in the middle of, digital transformation: the strategic adoption of digital technologies to improve processes and productivity, deliver better customer and employee experiences, and control costs. Companies with mobility and digital technologies in place can give their employees access to everything they need, on-premises and/or through cloud services, from anywhere and from any type of device.
The fact that many businesses, including ISEC7, were already well into digital transformation when COVID-19 hit made the move from working in the office to working from home much easier.
ISEC7 has employees across the globe. Most of them work from the office with home office capacity, and some work from their home office full-time. All employees are provisioned with corporate-owned computers, mainly laptops, and mobile devices enabled for both private and work use, the Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) deployment model. ISEC7 also has policies in place that allow Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). We explain the differences between these models in Why Ownership Model Matters.
When the pandemic became a global concern and led to lockdowns in March 2020, ISEC7 had a disaster recovery plan in place (something else to be thankful for). The company decided to move most of its employees to working from home and introduced staggered schedules for those still working in the office to preserve social distancing. By the time the pandemic hit Europe and the US in full, ISEC7 was already fully redeployed to working from home, with business as usual.
I'm incredibly grateful that there was no disruption in my workflow. ISEC7 uses a hybrid environment, with an on-premises back-end infrastructure and some cloud-based services (SaaS), and its use of VPN technology let me move from working in an office to working from home without a hitch. If you want to know how a VPN works, read Demystifying Security: Virtual Private Network (VPN).
As with any success story, this is not the result of magic or coincidence but of a long-term, thought-out strategy, in which the necessary time, resources and money were allocated with one goal: to become as mobile as possible.
Even though Thanksgiving will look different this year, there are many things to be thankful for: today's technologies that let us do pretty much anything from anywhere in real time, and the great work of everyone involved in the digital workplace transformation that made it possible for us to keep working, full speed ahead, through some of the most difficult times.
Building or reviewing your own digital workplace? Our team supports endpoint management and endpoint productivity projects for COPE and BYOD deployments alike. Contact us with any questions.