Remote working is not as ‘Instagram worthy’ as it may seem. While it may be a dream to work from anywhere and anytime, there are many challenges for those working remotely. A bigger challenge is faced by IT teams who have to provide support for such a sudden transition. At the outset of this pandemic, the overnight shift of employees working remotely has put immense pressure on IT teams to enable business continuity.
From accessibility of internal applications, sign-in assistance to password generation, IT teams are burdened with requests from remote working employees. Added to this there are other considerations IT teams need to address, from cyber threats, unsecure VPNs, authentication issues to reliability of on-premise servers.
Where to begin? To ease the pressure, IT teams are using emerging tech like low-code platforms to support remote dev teams, from providing cloud-powered IT infrastructure, application-level security, collaboration tools to real-time IT support.
Let’s take a look at how low-code platforms help IT teams support high-performance remote teams and ensure business continuity.
- Providing cloud-powered, IT Infrastructure – If one thing remote working has done is it has pushed enterprises and teams to become cloud-native. As development teams are now required to move from monolithic systems to microservices, the demand for scalable and cloud-ready applications is increasing. Low-code platforms are architected based on Docker containerization model and provide a lightweight IT environment. This cloud-powered, resource-optimized environment not only reduces the pressure on IT teams it helps to develop, test, and deploy applications faster.
- Ensuring application-level security – Building secure apps is one of the major concerns for remote dev teams. IT teams need to ensure application development best practices are followed and that applications are tested though relevant security hardening suites. With baked-in security features, low-code platforms offer application-level security in two main areas of authentication and authorization. By enabling the authentication feature, IT teams can control access that users have to different components of an application. With granular authorization, comprehensive authentication, and OWASP compliance support, secure applications can be developed.
- Supporting collaboration for agile operations – Remote dev teams need to be agile and digitally dexterous, and they demand tools that support collaborative project management, workstream collaboration, and smart meetings using video conferencing. IT plays an important role in improving collaboration across the development lifecycle. To streamline the process of collaboration, low-code provides an ideal IT solution to achieve agile operations. By creating an agile feedback loop, that allows sharing of service-delivery infrastructure and monitoring of user experience in a unified manner, collaboration with development and test teams can be ensured.
- Reducing the stress factor for IT Support – The shift to remote working has also aggressively driven modernization of legacy systems. Implementing modernization initiatives involves a change in roles, processes and tech infrastructure, creating friction points and adding stress on IT. Finding IT support for legacy systems is difficult and the skillsets of IT teams to maintain and support modern tech has to be up to mark. Here’s where low-code platforms can make a difference. By empowering business users to develop applications based on their needs, low-code platforms reduce the burden on traditional IT teams. Using a drag-and-drop approach there is minimal coding and code maintenance is hassle free. By reducing the time spent on support, IT teams using low-code development platforms get the bandwidth to deliver more and can focus on core IT functions of optimizing infrastructure and processes.
The essence of remote working is digital dexterity and the pressure is on IT teams to materialize this. To meet the demand for flexible IT infrastructure, application-level security, real-time collaboration and support, IT teams need to embrace technology with commitment. Where technology is changing faster than it can be supported, IT teams have to mobilize to keep up with the ‘Speed of Change’. As enterprises embark on the road to digital transformation and modernization, IT needs to shift gears to prevent being a roadblock. With the focus on business continuity, IT teams have become ‘backstage warriors’ and they need to use all available tools to realize their credo of “the show must go on!”
To know how IT teams can support remote dev teams using a low-code platform, take a walkthrough.
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