Distribution Partner of the Year: AVANT Communications

In 2022, the AVANT ecosystem continued its multi-year run as the largest single generator of TierPoint channel bookings. The keys to AVANT’s success include top-notch executive leadership, world-class engineering talent, and best-in-breed sales enablement programs. 

Through its Special Forces Summit and regional Bootcamp events, AVANT draws hundreds of trusted advisors for training and networking opportunities. The company also provides unique value through its proprietary Pathfinder software, offering dynamic insights and on-target intelligence for both trusted advisors and solution providers.

Services & Solutions Partner of the Year: CDW

CDW was TierPoint’s top-producing services and solutions partner across all regions in 2022. Their dedication to building strong customer relationships helped open the door to exciting new opportunities and positioned us repeatedly to win big together.   

With in-depth knowledge of TierPoint’s product portfolio, CDW’s Integrated Services Engagement (ISE) team worked closely with our engineers to develop customized solutions that delivered the business outcomes sought by our shared clients.

Alliance Partner of the Year: Zerto

As they have for multiple years, the Zerto team in 2022 proved yet again the power of collaboration, supporting the continued adoption and robust growth of TierPoint’s market-leading Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions.  

Across the board – from cloud architects to sales representatives –the Zerto team has proven remarkably easy to work with. Consistently, they have brought to the table a keen understanding of what it takes to win in today’s marketplace and helped our mutual clients achieve their resiliency goals.

Breakout Partner of the Year: Bridgepointe

Bridgepointe is recognized for driving strategic alignment between our companies, expanding our reach in several markets, and closing a major, six-figure monthly billing account. Their commitment and focus in 2022 were instrumental to building a strong and successful partnership.  

Our companies have collaborated on several marketing initiatives and co-sponsored events that strengthened our brands and increased our visibility, promising great upside in the future.

Pre-Sales Team of the Year: Telarus

This award recognizes Telarus for providing exceptional, pre-sales support, leading to more wins and revenue.

Telarus engineering resources exemplify greatness and have proven crucial to the success of our partnership. Consistently, they have brought to the table outstanding communication skills and tailored solutions that meet our shared customers’ needs, stayed up to date on industry trends, and demonstrated an unparalleled commitment to continuous learning and improvement. 

Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, announced its 2022 Partner of the year awards at their partner advisory board. The award winners are key standouts for contributions to the Zerto partnership program. Awards are based on a partner’s ability to deliver high-quality, innovative solutions. Solutions should focus on the customer’s needs, like the protection, recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications.

For the second year in a row, Zerto has named TierPoint as the “Managed Service Provider (MSP) of the Year”. This award recognizes TierPoint’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution for protecting virtualized workloads from data loss and downtime. The solution offers a variety of configurations with failover to private, multicloud, and public cloud services in the event of a disaster. TierPoint delivered significant revenue growth over the past year and grew the number of Zerto-protected virtual machines (VMs) by more than two million instances.

TierPoint and Zerto’s long-standing, cooperative relationship has resulted in numerous successful joint customer wins and marketing efforts. The TierPoint team appreciates the knowledge Zerto’s cloud architects and sales teams bring and looks forward to another successful year of collaboration and success.

TierPoint’s Focus on Enabling Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Disruptions come in many forms. At TierPoint, we understand businesses need to be ready to handle those disruptions and ensure business continuity. TierPoint offers solutions that minimize data loss and downtime, house infrastructure in diverse geographies across the U.S., ensure solutions meet low RPO and RTO requirements and create a strategy around resilience to combat vulnerable workloads and ransomware attacks. They do this with a combination of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Data Center, and cloud services.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (powered by Zerto)

Cloud-based disaster recovery is among the fastest-growing cloud services, and DRaaS enables recovery of your data, applications, and infrastructure – all within minutes. TierPoint’s Cloud to Cloud Recovery (DRaaS) solution flexibly fits your unique mix of recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), production environment, and recovery environment requirements.

Data Center Services

In combination with DRaaS, TierPoint offers backup solutions in its over 40 data centers across the United States. Because these data centers are geographically diverse, customers get additional resilience from natural disasters.

Hybrid IT and Cloud Services

The cloud has many benefits over traditional on-premises disaster recovery. Learn why disaster in the cloud is better than the alternatives. Our agnostic approach to the cloud enables us to manage your recovery and production workloads.

A complimentary playbook on overcoming business continuity challenges

Does your organization have a business continuity strategy? If so, does it account for more than one disaster? A great BC plan should account for various challenges and a roadmap to get your business operations back to normal. Download this complimentary eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Running Your Business Through Uncertainty and Disruption, to learn why you should make business continuity a top priority and how to overcome some of the biggest challenges.

BraveIT – 2021 focus

With a new and expanded focus on philanthropy, BraveIT 2021 will support charitable groups offering educational programs that help inspire and prepare various populations to pursue STEM careers.  

We start this year with eight such organizations. In the coming weeks, we’ll share their stories and encourage the public to vote for the one organization they believe most effectively achieves its mission.  

All eight received a $2,000 donation. The organization with the most votes will become our grand prize winner, earning an additional $10,000 donation. And the organizations with the second and third-most votes will each receive an additional $5,000. Winners were announced on Thu., Sept. 23 at 1:00 p.m. ET. Watch the full webcast here.  

Announcing the BraveIT Award winner

Congratulations to our winner, The Children’s Museum of the Upstate (TCMU). Nominated for this year’s program by our valued partners at Intelisys, TCMU is a Smithsonian affiliate and one of the largest children’s museums in the nation. TCMU is an incredible place where children can discover, learn and grow.  The organization offers over twenty exhibits that reflect all areas of STEM-based learning and hands-on weekly programming for building critical thinking and developing other important skills. Through scholarship-funded field trips, all children can experience TCMU.

Third and Second place winners were Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas and Warrior-Scholar Project. Congratulations to all our winners and nominees.  

BraveIT Award Nominees and Criteria

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs help innovative minds create, imagine, and excel.  As the employment landscape evolves, our future workforce requires STEM education. This year’s BraveIT initiative shines a light on organizations dedicated to closing the STEM skills gap and helping their participants achieve a bright and brave future for generations to come.    

The 2021 nominees: 

1. Aspire2STEAM.org 
2. FIRST Mid-Atlantic Robotics 
3. Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas 
4. Girls Who Code 
5. i.c.stars 
6. The Children’s Museum of the Upstate (TCMU) 
7. The Summer Science Program 
8. Warrior-Scholar Project 

Watch the BraveIT Award ceremony here. 

At the annual ZertoCON user conference, Zerto presented several partner awards based on 2020 revenue attainment, new customer adoption, and engagement with Zerto. This year, TierPoint was the recipient of the ‘Top MSP of the Year’ award based on total VMs protected, revenue and growth.

TierPoint has partnered with Zerto for eight years and increased the total VMs protected by 62%; in 2020, revenue with Zerto grew by nearly 50%. TierPoint’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, powered by Zerto, helps businesses meet RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) requirements with near-synchronous replication, automated failover to a secondary site, and is available as a fully managed or self-managed solution. TierPoint also took an aggressive sales, development, and marketing approach to position Zerto as a unique differentiator. This resulted in exponential growth with current customers and prospects in 2020.

Our Cloud to Cloud DRaaS solution powered by Zerto

TierPoint’s Cloud to Cloud Recovery (DRaaS) solutions flexibly fit your unique mix of recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), production environment, and recovery environment requirements. Automation provides peace of mind. Your organization can test your DR solution anytime, quickly recover from a cyberthreat or outage into an enterprise-class recovery environment and use your recovery environment for as long as you want.

Businesses depend on data, applications, and infrastructure, so data backup alone is not enough. Cloud-based disaster recovery is among the fastest-growing cloud services, and DRaaS enables recovery of your data, applications, and infrastructure – all within minutes. You can achieve more control over your recovery plan, replication, and failover with TierPoint DRaaS.

Download our Cloud to Cloud DRaaS, powered by Zerto fact sheet to learn more.

More Disaster Recovery resources

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity planning insights

The key to a successful business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) program is a comprehensive plan. BC/DR plans can be the difference between a minor and major downtime and data loss. Read some of our resources on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning.

Why You Should Test Your Disaster Recovery Plan

2021 Disaster Recovery trends

The pandemic has changed how many businesses will approach IT resilience in 2021 and beyond. With more remote workers, businesses need to evolve and find ways to protect their business critical applications and data. Here are some resources on the trends we’re seeing in 2021.

IDC Technology Spotlight: 2021 Trends Driving Data Resilience
Mitigating Ransomware Attacks with Secure Data and Storage

Disaster Recovery solutions: Why Disaster Recovery as Service (DRaaS)?

There are multiple disaster recovery services options to choose from. We believe that DRaaS is one of the best disaster recovery solutions for businesses who have specific RPO (recovery point objectives) and RTO (recovery time objectives) goals. Here are some resources on why DRaaS is a great option.

Why Adopt DRaaS? 5 Considerations to Maximize Business Benefits

We can help with disaster recovery and business continuity planning

Want to learn more about Disaster Recovery as a Service or talk to an expert? Contact us today.

“Companies that had already gone digital [last March] were in a better position. They moved faster, had strategic partners ready, and had resilience built into their model,” said Ted Schadler, a principal analyst at Forrester. “But those companies made up only about one in seven, while the other 85 percent were scrambling, and making things up as they went.”

To get a better perspective on what that 85% needs to do to get ready for 2021, several IT leaders and innovators spoke at BraveIT 2020, TierPoint’s virtual conference, on aspects of the pandemic and the role of future technologies. Ted Schadler was one expert who shared his insights, in How to Survive the Pandemic Recession, along with Bruce Randall, director of product marketing ServiceNow, Michael Morris, vice chairman, Newman Knight Frank, and Lucie Poulicakos senior vice president of IT at TierPoint.

Insights on how business will adapt to a post-pandemic world

Here are the key insights these experts shared how successful companies thrived in 2020 and the changes that all companies can expect in the year ahead.

Hybrid & remote work policies

Home offices are here to stay, even after Covid-19 is no longer a threat. In 2021, Forrester projects that remote workers will begin to return to their offices, but that remote worker policies will still be 300% higher than in pre-COVID-19 times. Forrester predicts the rise of the “anywhere-plus-office” hybrid work model. The hybrid model will accommodate employees differing situations and needs. For instance, city workers might not want to spend every day inside a cramped studio apartment. Noisy families can make it difficult for other employees to concentrate. Newly hired employees may need an on-site environment in order to feel connected to their colleagues.

“A lot of younger folks need to learn the workplace politics and dynamics of their situations, and can truly benefit from working alongside senior employees,” said Morris.

As Schadler explained, the future is neither all remote nor all office based. “Patterns of work and life and trade have been forever changed by this pandemic,” said Schadler, “Every company will need to figure it out for themselves.”

Also read: Equip Your Workforce with the Right Remote Working Tools

Home-office tech support

As the majority of IT support professionals have found, remote workers aren’t always as easy to support as office-based workers. Instead of dealing with standardized desktop equipment, connected to one network, behind the corporate firewall, remote workers are using an array of laptops, desktops, and tablets with individual Wi-Fi and internet providers, and different types of anti-malware and security software. Corporate tech support will be the first point of contact that frustrated end users talk to when they have problems, regardless of whether the company actually provided the equipment. Poulicakos remembers the flood with calls from end users having trouble with various peripherals, including headsets, in the early days of the pandemic.

“We had to provide a lot of support for headsets, and there are so many different models that all work differently,” she said.

To cope with this new reality, IT tech support must become familiar with its home users IT environments.

Also read: Adapting IT Services for a Remote Workforce: A COVID-19 Pandemic FAQ

Employee self-service

To avoid overwhelming the tech support staff, IT can implement more self-service options for employees, especially for the most common problems. ServiceNow’s support team reported that its daily volume of support calls rose between 25% and 50%, many of which were for common issues such as VPN outages or problems with collaboration tools. Many tech support issues can be resolved by the end user, with the help of a self-service portal or web site with tutorials, wizards, and downloadable apps.

“Organizations that can successfully handle this increased volume without killing their IT staff will have robust self-service capabilities,” said Randall.

Automation and AI

A key part of self-service will be automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Forrester’s predictions for 2021 forecasts that by the end of 2021, 25% of all remote workers will be using new types of automation. In addition, Forrester expects investments in machine learning and conversational AI to rise. Some of the ways in which AI and automation will help IT include virtual agents to resolve common issues such as password resets or VPN access, and process automation bots– snippets of code for running automated, repetitive jobs that humans used to do manually.

“A university might get thousands of calls about VPNs when all they had to do was put a virtual agent in place who could resolve that entire complication within minutes,” said Randall.

Focus on resilience

In order to weather future unexpected catastrophes, IT organizations must become more resilient. Achieving resilience starts with a strategy to identify potential weak points in the IT infrastructure and operations and develop ways to prevent or remediate these vulnerabilities. A strategy should include plans for ensuring redundancy and diversification of resources (such as having multiple options for remote access should one fail), and for establishing partnerships with organizations that can provide support, such as disaster recovery services, temporary IT staff, or emergency office space.

Knowledge sharing

Knowledge is power and the more knowledge your IT staff has, the faster they can respond to an emergency. For example, IT staff can document and distribute information about critical issues, such as remote security requirements, details of the company’s DR plan, or what to do if they suspect their laptop is infected. Non-IT power users also have good information to share. Encourage them to offer short video or Zoom presentations on common end-user questions such as how to implement a VPN, how to use a tech support knowledgebase, or how to backup data.

“I see a lot more power users teaching other users,” said Schadler. “In one situation, a power user of a popular collaboration tool offered monthly lunch sessions on how to get the most out of the application. It was powerful.”

Strategic partners

IT departments will increasingly partner with outside providers of IT services. The goal is to outsource activities that aren’t core to the business or which the in-house staff lack expertise. Some examples of the services that partners provide are cloud storage and compute services, colocation facilities, IT equipment rentals, business continuity planning, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), security monitoring services, and help desk support.

A good partner operates as a branch of your organization and provides key services, advice, and technical support as needed. In the face of a future crisis, a reliable partner can be critical to survival.

The coronavirus epidemic has altered how we work, how we collaborate, and what technologies will be essential in the years ahead. Mobile and remote technologies are no longer nice-to-have capabilities but are now essential in most organizations. The increase in mobile and remote work, and the diversity of home equipment, will put IT support professionals under greater stress. Strategic planning and outsourcing partnerships are increasingly critical to long-term survival.

Learn more about the BraveIT Conference and watch more sessions

Want to hear more advice and insight on surviving and thriving in the face of rapid change and potential disruptions? Watch all of the presentations by IT industry leaders at BraveIT 2020.

Now that the dust is beginning to settle, we might ask what we’ve learned from the pandemic and what should we do to address future potential disasters. Several of the IT leaders who presented at BraveIT 2020, TierPoint’s technology and leadership conference, shared their thoughts on how Covid-19 is changing IT.

Held September 16-17, BraveIT showcased a wide range of technology innovators, experts, and IT executives speaking on topics such as cloud and multicloud infrastructure, disaster recovery planning, cloud security, and the future technology trends.

In a session on Enabling a Remote Workforce, TierPoint’s Matt Brickey and Nutanix senior director of product management, Param Desai talked about the main ways in which sudden, major disruptions impact how CIOs manage technology and work in their organizations.

Brickey and Desai identified three major ways in which IT managers will change their approach to workforce and technology management.

Embracing new tech to support remote employees

Companies that have embraced new technologies often have more options for surviving disruptions and disasters. That was borne out last March 2020, when the organizations that had already rolled out cloud services, mobile devices for employees, VPNs, and collaborative applications were most able to support remote workers.

“Businesses that have been on the forefront of adopting newer technologies were able to deal with this pandemic better,” said Desai, noting that just about every remote workforce technology currently in use already existed prior to the pandemic, including telemedicine, remote video conferencing applications, remote payment services, contact-less shopping and delivery, and cloud-based applications and storage.

Also read: Equip Your Workforce with the Right Remote Working Tools

Small organizations with limited budgets often had the fewest options, but even many large companies lagged behind in new technology adoption, often due to corporate culture or industry practices that favor the status quo. Those organizations may use out-of-date enterprise applications that are well passed their end-of-life services, continuously patch aged legacy systems, or use cloud services for small, point applications only.

Adopt an outcomes-based approach to problem solving

As TierPoint’s Brickey noted, IT departments traditionally provide products not outcomes or results.

“An employee needs a new server; you provision a new server,” said Brickey. “But IT needs to be an enabler of business outcomes not just things.”

That products-based approach was evident during the pandemic when IT leaders issued thousands of purchase orders for laptops, home desktops, headsets, VPN licenses, WIFI and ethernet routers, and other remote work equipment.

However, Desai explained that they could have considered alternatives such as TierPoint’s Virtual Desktop Services and Nutanix’ XiFrame desktop-as-a-service, both of which can securely enable distributed workers to access critical applications from any location, over any device or browser.

Also read: 5 Reasons Businesses Choose Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

“Instead of looking for point solutions, they should look for wider solutions to a more general problem,” said Desai.

Disaster recovery (DR) is another area that calls for a broader perspective. For instance, IT departments are used to handling server outages. But what if the entire server farm suddenly goes dark? Or a flood or fire takes out the corporate data center? You can’t simply replace hundreds of servers.

“IT needs to proactively look for larger global sets of problems and solutions, not just small, short-term ones,” said Desai. “For instance, we’ve had a lot of fires in California that forced people and businesses to relocate. If your data center were impacted by a massive fire, could you switch access to your data to another data center?”

Greater collaboration with IT services providers

Outsourcing parts of your IT operations is common in companies of all sizes. CIOs will often outsource activities that are either outside of the experience of in-house IT staff or take up too much of the IT staff’s time. Examples include cloud storage and compute resources, software as a service, security monitoring, and managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

Desai predicts that outside service providers will continue to be a key resource for IT organizations. Outsourcers such as managed services providers offer a cost-effective alternative to building out data centers or hiring additional IT staff.

Service providers can also give organizations access to new technologies that they wouldn’t have the time to research or implement on their own.

“IT will need to rely on outside experts like TierPoint more than they used to,” said Desai. “A good IT provider can enable a remote workforce for any organization. Think of them as part of your team.”

Watch the full BraveIT 2020 Nutanix session

Learn more about the BraveIT Conference and watch more sessions

Want to hear more advice and insight on surviving and thriving in the face of rapid change and potential disruptions? Watch all of the presentations by IT industry leaders at BraveIT 2020.

Learn more about TierPoint’s new Virtual Desktop Services powered by Nutanix Frame.

IDC predicts global spending on AI will more than double over the next four years, from $50.1 billion in 2020 to more than $110 billion in 2024. Software and cloud services vendors are implementing AI in a wide range of products. According to International Data Corp. (IDC) the leading use cases for AI are:

• Automated customer service agents
• Sales process automation
• Automated threat intelligence
• General IT automation

Other common uses for AI include healthcare diagnostics, fraud detection in financial services, natural language processing for human interaction, personalization in marketing and ecommerce, robotics, pharmaceutical research, agriculture, oil and gas exploration, predictive maintenance for equipment, and many, many others.

How experts see artificial intelligence’s impact on business

The current and future value of AI in business was the topic of a panel discussion at TierPoint’s September BraveIT 2020 virtual conference. IT executives and AI experts shared insights in the session AI applications have arrived for your business. The participants included moderator Jonathon Beckham, an attorney with GT law who specializes in technology and intellectual property, and panelists Ankur Dinish Garg, Chief of AI at Sonasoft, Bob Schukai, SVP Identity Solutions for Mastercard and Darius Withers, senior in-house counsel for technology at Accenture.

According to the panelists, AI with machine learning provides the most value in situations that require real-time decision-making based on large volumes of data and multiple or complex variables. While the human brain is good at dealing with complex questions, it’s not always able to do so quickly. AI, however, can make real-time decisions that involve gigabytes or terabytes of data and multiple variables. That capability is highly useful in all sorts of industries and business applications.

The panelists highlighted three major industries that are getting big benefits from AI, both now and in the near future.

Applications of AI in Financial services

Research company Omdia predicts that financial services organizations will spend more than $9 million of AI software in 2025. Banks, insurers, mortgage lenders, and other financial services firms use AI technology to optimize their often complex processes, detect anomalies quickly to prevent errors, and even do predictive analytics for such things as identifying factors that might affect the outcome of future claims or reducing losses from fraud.

Stock trading is a prime example of using AI to work through multiple dynamic, and often conflicting variables. Financial Services professionals in charge of stock portfolios can leverage AI software to evaluate an array of information, including market reports, analyst notes, stock trends, and corporate research, to make investment decisions based on each customer’s goals.

AI is also helpful in fighting financial fraud. An AI engine can learn to detect patterns, spot anomalies, and determine whether a transaction might be fraudulent.

“Fraud detection is a matter of authenticating the person and looking at the variables in the transaction—where is it coming from, has the person bought things like this before, has the card been popping up on a bunch of different IP addresses—and deciding whether to accept or reject the transaction,” explained Schukai.

Applications of AI in IT operations

Network and data center management is another major market for AI. The telecom industry alone will spend $36.7 billion annual in AI products and services by 2025, according to Tractica. Large data center companies as well as cloud services providers and cybersecurity companies all use AI extensively.

“AI is very important in networking and the data center space and in any other place where data is flowing and you can’t rely on human response time,” explained Garg. “AI can interface on the fly,” said Garg.

Cybersecurity applications and services need AI to sort through complex data and transactions to identify possible hacks, suspicious end user behavior, or incoming cyberattacks. Cybersecurity requires learning the behaviors of applications, end users, and machines, accessing databases of known threats, and making near instantaneous decisions. Humans can’t operate that quickly, but AI can.

Also read: New Cybersecurity Challenges: 5G, IoT and AI

Applications of AI in Education and Human Resources

AI is useful in human resources, worker training, and professional development. One new AI-powered application, called Avenues, trains social workers through virtual reality scenarios using an Oculus VR headset, natural language processor, and a database of past child welfare cases. The social worker is confronted with various domestic situations and asked to decide on the best course of action, such as remove a child from the house or offer parents different support services. Created by Accenture, the Avenues application takes social workers through an immersive training experience that includes much of ambiguity and stress of real-life situations but allows them to practice making the tough decisions without real-life consequences.

“As technology improves, we’ll see this used in other learning environments—pilots, truck drivers, you name it,” said Withers.

Challenges ahead: transparency and consumer trust

Businesses will soon need to provide greater transparency into how their AI engines make decisions. Most new technologies over the years – the Internet, WiFi, online banking, even search engines—have been easier for consumers to comprehend. At the same time, AI is increasingly controlling people’s stock portfolios, mortgage approvals, healthcare coverage, and even the operation of their smart cars. Consumers will demand a greater amount of transparency into how these AI engines are making their decisions, said panelists.

“This is one of the biggest challenges,” said Schukai. “It will require our industry to open up and lay bare how things work.”

That demand for transparency will push government agencies to become involved and force AI vendors to develop ways of auditing their technologies.

“Auditing is a very important requirement,” said Garg. “Regulatory agencies need to be able to handle AI. They need to look at why did the AI take a specific action, whether there’s a bias or not, and how do we ensure there isn’t bias.”

Blockchain may offer a solution to how to audit AI. Blockchain is a digital ledger that can enable auditing of transactions and data, as well as ensure security. With blockchain, auditors could determine why certain decisions were made and what information was used to make them.

“Blockchain may be the missing link between AI and trust,” said Garg.

Despite the challenges, Garg and the other panelists were upbeat about the future of AI and the industry’s willingness to implement auditing and other methods for improving transparency and consumer trust.

Watch the full session: AI Applications for your Business Have Arrived

Learn more about the BraveIT Conference and watch more sessions

This session, along with many others, are now available for playback on our BraveIT TV 2020 page. Learn more about BraveIT 2020 and to get ongoing news on BraveIT (HINT: BraveIT 2021).

Given the dramatic impact of Covid-19 on IT, it’s no surprise that it was a key theme of several sessions at BraveIT 2020. In one important session, The Pivot for Now: IT Peers Share COVID-19 Stories, executives from three companies related their efforts to remotely enable employees and support customers during the early weeks of the pandemic. Charles Osborn of Enable Midstream Partners (an energy company) and Phil Goldfeder of Cross River Bank joined TierPoint’s IT Strategy Workshop conductor dMitri DeVos and TierPoint Senior VP of Marketing Pete Abel in a lively discussion of how these organizations handled the Covid-19 crisis.

What our IT peers said about pivoting for COVID-19 in March

Enable Midstream talks about the foundational IT groundwork

Charles Osborn, VP and CIO of Enable Midstream Partners, explains that when the first cases of Covid-19 in the U.S. were reported in March 2020, the IT staff at Enable Midstream Partners began working in earnest to equip its employees—scattered across 11 states—to work remotely. Fortunately, the company had already implemented several key mobile technologies in the prior two years, so it had a good foundation on which to build.

“Those earlier strategies helped a lot,” noted Osborn, pointing to WebEx Teams collaboration software and Office 365 Tenant as two critical cloud applications that Enable had adopted pre-Covid.

In addition, the company began provisioning key employees with VPNs and multi-factor authentication and established a disaster recovery service through TierPoint. The IT staff had also created an external help desk, which they began scaling up as it became apparent it would be supporting as many as 1,500 employees. Finally, the company contracted for office space with TierPoint, to provide facilities for employees who could not work from home.

Also read: Can Your Network Bandwidth Support Your Remote Workers and Customers?

Perhaps the biggest advantage, however, was Enable’s advisory team of oil and gas industry executives.

“We had an amazing network of energy CIOs telling us what to expect and sharing best practices,” said Osborn.

However, Enable still had more work to do if it was going to make its workers fully remote. The IT staff doubled the company’s Internet circuits and expanded employee training on how to use WebEx Teams and other remote work technologies. Finally, they created a prioritization strategy for provisioning employees with VPNs, to ensure critical employees would be first in line.

The one major surprise that Osborn and his team encountered was fairly mundane. They hadn’t considered how much physical effort and equipment went into creating electronic processes such as digital documents and signatures.

“We didn’t appreciate the physical connectedness of workflows, like scanning in files while also ensuring that regulatory controls over those files were followed,” he said.

They also learned that speed is critical in disaster planning: “We thought we’d have weeks to get ready, but weeks turned into days, and then hours.”

Cross River Bank discusses the virtual workforce & PPP program

Phil Goldfeder, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs, at Cross River Bank in Ft. Lee, N.J., a regional bank that specializes in funding financial technology start-ups. When it became apparent in March 2020 that the bank’s entire workforce would be operating virtually, the IT department hurried to provide equipment and secure connections to its 320 employees.

Fortunately, management had anticipated the need for more home-based workers and had already approved purchases of additional computers, hardware, home office equipment, and even cases of Purell to keep everyone healthy. But it was still a scramble to set up hundreds of remote offices with secure connections and workflows that met all banking regulations.

“We had to transition 320 employees under one roof to 320 employees under 320 roofs,” said Goldfeder. “We had to ensure we had the equipment, the IT infrastructure, and the ability to comply with consumer privacy and protection requirements. Our team worked literally around the clock to make sure everyone had the resources they needed to work from home without cutting corners on banking regulations.”

Also read: Equip Your Workforce with the Right Remote Working Tools

Cross River’s staff faced a second major challenge when the federal government suddenly announced the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in late March. The PPP was designed to get loans to businesses suffering from lost revenues due to Covid-19. With many of the bank’s customers facing major business losses and worker layoffs, Cross River wanted to create a fast, streamlined process for submitting the hundreds, or possibly thousands, of the applications it expected to get.

Fortunately, Cross River has experience in helping entrepreneurs and small firms get business loans, so was in a uniquely good position to get the PPP workflow going quickly. But it was still a race, as the program began in early April with limited funds. Speed was essential to ensuring customers got their loans.

Thanks to the bank’s experience in the financial technology industry, Cross River understood the value of IT automation over human manual labor in loan processing. This turned out to be a key advantage.

“Some banks needed thousands of employees to do what we did with fewer than 100,” said Goldfeder. “We processed 7,000 applications on April 3rd, the first day of the program.”

By April 16, when the original $349 billion in funds ran out, the bank had processed 198,000 loans—the third-highest volume of PPE loans in the country. Only Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase Bank handled more.

“Big banks often throw workers at a problem instead of innovating to be more efficient,” he said. “This pandemic has proved that financial services institutions need to innovate or suffer the consequences.”

How TierPoint and their customers pivoted at the onset of the pandemic

dMitri DeVos, Vice President of Solutions Engineering, at TierPoint, a provider of cloud services, colocation facilities, and managed services, the challenge last spring was meeting a surge in demand for all types of mobile and remote computing services. TierPoint was already in a good position with a variety of technology partnerships and cloud services, including security, connectivity, help desk, disaster recovery, cloud infrastructure, and cloud app development. All of these services and solutions were suddenly in great demand by existing and new customers.

According to DeVos, interest in cloud adoption, as well as managed services, increased the most. He quoted an UpTime Institute survey, released in early April 2020, that reported on the top challenges and concerns that organizations faced in March. It found that 45% needed to reduce staffing, while another 45% had to delay key data center projects, and 42% had to reduce or defer scheduled maintenance for IT equipment.

“They’re interested in managed services to augment the IT staff they’ve lost,” DeVos said.

Also read: Adapting IT Services for a Remote Workforce: A COVID-19 Pandemic FAQ

Adoption of managed services is on the rise, both day-to-day tasks such as performance monitoring and backup services, as well as for more strategic areas like managed security and managed disaster recovery.

If there’s one major change that the pandemic has caused in the IT industry, it’s greater adoption of cloud services in general, to better manage IT costs, said DeVos.

“It’s about maintaining service availability and providing services with reduced staff and reduced revenues,” he said. “Because they’re all expecting this to last not only through 2021 but probably 2022 as well.”

Watch the entire session

Learn more about BraveIT

In addition to this session, we held a session about pivoting for the future: How to Survive a Pandemic Recession. In that session, Forrester, Service Now, and Newmark Knight Frank discuss what IT leaders should start doing now to realign their digital transformation efforts to survive the 2020 Pandemic Recession.

This session, along with many others, are now available for playback on our BraveIT TV 2020 page. Learn more about BraveIT 2020 and to get ongoing news on BraveIT (HINT: BraveIT 2021).

A recap of the main topics and events at BraveIT 2020

First the fun stuff. There were plenty of opportunities to get fit at this year’s BraveIT. The show featured four fitness classes, including a high-intensity resistance training class, yoga, and a boxing-inspired workout of cardio and strength exercises. Some lucky viewers received grocery boxes from chef Fabio Viviani and cooked along during his live cooking demonstration, right from their own kitchens. Guests also had the opportunity to participate in a trade show scavenger hunt, a high-tech magic show, a trivia contest, and the online chat lounge where attendees could discuss sessions, share ideas, and network.

The educational sessions focused on three major themes: the coronavirus pandemic’s effects on IT and business; predictions and advice on hybrid and multicloud adoption; and the potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI).

Here is an overview of the sessions in each of these key categories, with quotes from a few of the speakers:

Growing hybrid and multicloud adoption

“Why are businesses getting rid of the on-premises data center? Because it’s costly, it’s usually not a core competency of the company, and it lacks agility. When you build a new data center, two years later it’s obsolete.”

Rich Cannon, Senior Director, Pyramid Consulting

By 2022, over 90% of organizations around the globe will have hybrid IT environments, with various combinations of on-premises legacy systems, private clouds, and public cloud services, according to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC). Multicloud deployments will continue to grow as companies continue to add cloud services to their existing infrastructure.

BraveIT speakers discussed this dramatic rise of multicloud adoption, gave predictions on future use cases for hybrid cloud infrastructure, and offered advice on how to optimize the value of a hybrid or multicloud investment. For example, Geoff Thompson, vice president at VMware shared his insight into the complex forces shaping the cloud strategies of IT organizations, while speaker Rich Cannon, senior director of channel sales at Pyramid Consulting, predicted strong growth for the cloud industry over the next two to three years. Watch the sessions.

Strategies for surviving the pandemic

“The IT organizations that are enlightened are transforming first, and actually teaching other parts of their companies how to transform.”

Ted Schadler, VP Analyst, Forrester

Several sessions focused on how businesses and IT organizations can survive the current pandemic and recession. They featured analysts, vendors, and executives of organizations that have successfully transformed their operations. Speakers included oil and gas company Enable Midstream Partners, cloud infrastructure provider Nutanix, IT research firm Forrester, cloud services provider TierPoint, and real estate services company Newman Knight Frank.

The presenters shared advice and insight on a range of issues related to the pandemic, such as IT’s role in supporting business change, strategies for turning challenges into opportunities, and thoughts on surviving a business downturn. Watch the sessions.

The impact of AI and emerging technologies

“Instead of using AI to scale companies, we should use AI to scale human lives. We should invent technology that augments human intelligence rather than automating it, and that collaborates with people rather than competing with them. As with all powerful technology, we need to make choices about what we do with AI.”

Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri and founding board member of the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society.

IT is an industry full of new ideas and innovations, so you’d expect to find ample discussion of emerging technologies at BraveIT2020. In fact, several sessions focused on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, virtual reality, smart devices, and other technology developments that offer practical benefits. Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, kicked things off in his keynote presentation on smart cities and the economic and cultural forces influencing their development. In another session, Bob Schukai, SVP of identity solutions at Mastercard, discussed the value of AI in cybersecurity, fraud identification, and identity management.

“We should invent technology that augments human intelligence rather than automating it. And that collaborates with people, rather than competing with them.” @tagruber, co-creator & co-founder of Siri in the opening #keynote at #BraveIT 2020. #AI https://t.co/Ux7CVlgWAj pic.twitter.com/FrBlS4yOUA

— TierPoint (@tierpoint) September 16, 2020

Computer scientist Tom Gruber’s talk on Humanistic Artificial Intelligence focused on the need for an ethical framework for AI development. Darius Withers, senior corporate attorney at Accenture, shared a current example of how AI can benefit society: an innovative training application for social worker that used both AI and virtual reality (VR), as well as a database of past social work case histories and data. In the session on AI Applications for Your Business Have Arrived, Withers explained how the application enabled social workers to practice responding to difficult family scenarios in a virtual reality setting, instead of making critical mistakes in a real-life situation. Watch the sessions.

Our partner showcases

Other speakers discussed AI’s increasingly central role in business and IT applications, and its potential for the future.

Finally, alongside the sessions and keynote presentations, a virtual Exhibitors Hall offered participants the chance to learn about vendors and their products. Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware, Pure Storage, NetApp, Console Connect, and several other companies exhibited their technologies and services, with live representatives available to answer questions and provide educational literature and videos. Read more about our BraveIT 2020 sponsors.

More on BraveIT 2020 and BraveIT 2021

Over the next few months, we’ll be doing some in-depth recaps analyzing each session. Stay tuned for more. We hope to meet in-person next year, but whatever the coming year holds, we look forward to recognizing the stories of the many IT leaders who continue to inspire us with their dedication and passion. Learn more about BraveIT.

Did you miss BraveIT 2020? Watch the conference on-demand.

2020 BraveIT Winner: Shannon Orr of Avant and A Silver Lining Foundation

We’re pleased to recognize Avant National Channel Manager Shannon Orr as our 2020 BraveIT Award winner.

Over the last year, Shannon helped raise over $100,000 for various charities across 30 different organizations, collected and distributed over 100 survivor supply bags of goods to the homeless community in Chicago, personally sewed over 100 face masks for local hospital staff, and helped raise $13k+ for Fisher House Foundation, an organization supporting the families of injured soldiers.

Through Avant’s Inclusion and Diversity committee, Shannon teamed up with Xposure, a channel-focused organization, to help launch a new national strategy to educate, promote, and recruit diverse candidates to the IT channel industry. Shannon is also the Co-Captain of Alliance of Channel Women Chicago Chapter. Last year, she helped grow the chapter from 3 to 75 members and held 15 events supporting women with mentor programs.

Shannon’s own mentor, Dr. Sandy Goldberg, is the founder of A Silver Lining Foundation, and she was the inspiration behind Shannon’s focus on giving back. A Silver Lining Foundation was founded in 2002 after Dr. Sandy’s own journey with breast cancer. The organization provides cost-free breast health testing and fully funded treatments to women who need financial help.

Highlighting our other 2020 BraveIT award nominees

2020 was a year filled with examples of bravery and commitment. In addition to our award winner, we’d like to recognize and thank these other nominees for their contributions:

Jill Binder, Diverse in Tech – When Jill was asked to co-organize a tech conference in 2013, she recognized the need to represent a more diverse audience from the stage. Since then, her workshop program, Diverse in Tech, has helped more than 350 people from underrepresented groups in 35 countries find their voice and gather the courage to speak at conferences around the world. Watch this video to learn more about Diverse in Tech.

Bob Schukai, Downtown T-Rex – Bob Schukai leverages his reach as a tech blogger to support organizations like Downtown T-Rex, a tech start-up incubator in St Louis, and Apps for Good, a non-profit which teaches children 10-18 to become entrepreneurs.

Sam Staley, The Harbor Entrepreneur Center – Sam Staley is the founder of Event.Gives, an event management platform that helps non-profits raise funds. In his “free time,” Sam also is a mentor at The Harbor Entrepreneur Center in Charleston, SC, where he helps guide and grow other start-ups in the region.

Our previous 2018 and 2019 BraveIT Award Winners

A technology-driven world will always require strong leaders who are a force for good. Our winners from 2018 and 2019 set an excellent example.

2019: Uriel Ash, SVP of engineering and infrastructure for Cross River Bank

Uriel helps charities in his area implement or improve their IT infrastructure. The non-profits that have benefited from his help include a soup kitchen; a thrift store dedicated to providing affordable appliances, furniture, and clothing to financially-strapped individuals and families; and a volunteer ambulance service that provides low-cost and free emergency services to the community. Read more about the 2019 BraveIT Award winner.

2018: Joe Wilkinson, Code the Block

Joe leads Code the Block, which teaches coding to inner-city high school students in the Kansas City area. Started as an after-school program, Code the Block has expanded its services to include several summer camps and multiple courses: introduction to software engineering, web development, and app development. Learn more about the 2018 BraveIT Award winner.

We hope to see you next year at BraveIT 2021

This year, we held our first-ever, 100% virtual BraveIT conference. We hope to be back to a live, in-person event next year. And whatever the coming year holds, we look forward to recognizing the stories of the many IT leaders who continue to inspire us with their dedication and passion. Learn more about BraveIT.

Did you miss BraveIT 2020? Watch the entire conference on-demand.