EDITOR ’ S COMMENT
Channel partners will seek more disruption-proof solutions for their customers , considering the lessons learned during the pandemic . the office . Lenovo research shows that 83 % of IT leaders expect at least half of work in the future to happen outside a traditional office .
We will see more products , solutions and services designed for the employee experience , considering the office as a destination for collaboration , while protecting the sense of personal space people have experienced by working from home . Channel partners will see technology like AI , AR / VR and Lenovo ’ s smart collaboration suite of tools , providing new features and capabilities that will continue to change how employees interact with technology and one another , transforming the concept of workplace and workforce in ways that allow them to integrate seamlessly and succeed as one .
In terms of the security challenge of the work from home ( WFH ), we expect to see a move away from traditional passwords to seamless authentication driven by AI and improved sensor technology . Near-term , public key infrastructure ( PKI ) -based device security , like those used today to access our mobile banking applications , and multifactor authentication ( MFA ), will continue to shrink reliance on passwords for application and device access . Biometrics , like fingerprint , face , iris , and voice authentication , will do the security work instead . Taking a pass on conventional passwords will become one of the safest things the channel and IT industry can do .
In addition to all this progression , many organisations are turning to hybrid cloud environments , with some applications in the cloud and some workloads on-premises , which creates demand for data infrastructure that has the flexibility to scale to meet their needs , to move workloads to the right platform , seamlessly integrate across platforms and to reduce the complexity of managing a diverse environment . Lenovo ’ s solutions have been designed for these complex deployment scenarios , with features such as endto-end data management , encrypted data protection and protection of data at motion , at rest and in the cloud .
Today , more organisations are looking at Edge Computing to account for the fact that more data is created at the Edge of the network , outside of the traditional data centre and network perimeter , through connected devices , remote employees , IoT sensors and so on . Edge Computing gives the same abilities to use data as if it were in the data centre , such as applying analytics , automation of decisions and so on , while overcoming the bandwidth and latency issues . Going forward , channel partners will seek more disruption-proof solutions for their customers , considering the lessons learned during the pandemic . Solutions that support such new norms as work-fromanywhere ( WFA ) and other hybrid working models will be available to the channel under one structure now .
We have recognised that there are several partners who would like to diversify their revenue and earnings streams by becoming more service-led or solutionsbased . Based on this , Lenovo has recently unveiled a first-of-its-kind global channel partner framework designed to provide easier access to the entire company portfolio across devices , infrastructure , and services and solutions . The new Lenovo 360 framework comes at a time when small businesses and large enterprises alike are increasingly moving towards the everything-as-a-service consumption model . We are helping partners capitalise on service-led and solutions-based opportunities with their customers and drive additional revenue streams . •
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 49 17