Nearly 50 per cent of Canadian businesses say they are still not prepared to support or maintain long-term remote work because of the rapid digitization that it necessitates, according to a recent survey conducted by OVHcloud and data service solutions company Maru/Blue.
“Many Canadian organizations need immediate support in digitizing their business for the new realities of the modern workforce,” explains Stéphane Malouin, sales director Americas at OVHcloud, a global cloud provider with a Canadian data centre in Beauharnois, Quebec, in a press release. “What holds true is that the pandemic was a sure indication that businesses not only need to, but want to, optimize their online presence while better protecting and managing their data.”
Only a third (32 per cent) of Canadian businesses say they are confident that they can seamlessly scale cloud capabilities for the new realities of work while 90 per cent of organizations say they would like to speed up their digital operations.
According to the survey, Canadian organizations believe that the greatest challenges to scaling up their cloud operations for the new digital work are cybersecurity and privacy risks (44 per cent) and cost (37 per cent). In addition, only one in three Canadian businesses thinks their cloud service provider is prepared to help them shift workloads and has the proper structures in place to respect and protect their data sovereignty. For companies with under 100 employees, however, 23 per cent do not think their IT team has the experience to manage or use cloud services.
Canadian businesses also express regret when looking back, with two-third (66 per cent) of participating companies saying that they would not have been impacted by COVID-19 this severely if they had put in place a more robust digital strategy to manage their online operations.
Nearly 75 per cent Ontario businesses were particularly likely to agree that a digital strategy would have minimized the immediate COVID-19 impact, while Quebec-based businesses were less likely to agree (53 per cent). Moreover, responses of businesses in British Columbia indicate that nearly a third of them were less likely to have the right infrastructure in place. Additionally, 58 per cent of companies say they are concerned about security as they embrace more robust digital strategies. Four in ten companies also say that they lack the adequate IT infrastructure to manage hybrid cloud or multi-cloud operations and that they do not have the resources to speed up their digital strategy.
“There’s no question about it,” says Malouin. “As organizations grow digitally so does the risk of cyber threat, prompting the practice of safeguarding sensitive information no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a ‘need-to-have’ in today’s landscape.”
OVHcloud recently enhanced its Canadian portfolio of cloud solutions by adding web hosting offers to dedicated servers, private cloud and public cloud offerings in an attempt to help Canadian businesses deal with the new challenges resulting from COVID-19.