A year into the coronavirus pandemic, there are reasons to hope that the worst will soon be behind us. Healthcare professionals are administering vaccines at a rate of more than 1 million shots per day in the U.S., and public health officials predict that life could return to something approaching “normal” by this fall.

However, even once the pandemic is over, organizations will be able to leverage the technology solutions they have deployed to help them navigate the crisis. Many industry observers have already noted the ways that cloud collaboration and remote work solutions will change the future of business. Here are three more (sometimes overlooked) COVID-19-era technologies that will continue to have an impact in the coming years.

ServiceNow recently announced four return-to-work applications focused on helping customers prepare and manage their employees for a safe return to the workplace. From employee readiness surveys to health screening to PPE inventory management and more, these apps and the complimentary management dashboard will help ensure that the workforce transition from home back to the office is seamless and safe.

In its bid to help organizations return to the workplace in a safe manner, ServiceNow is doing what it does best, helping companies manage the complex workflows that are integral part of keeping employees healthy. The ServiceNow Safe Workplace suite is engineered with that in mind.

In my role as product manager at CDW for emerging technologies, I work with vendors that are producing some amazing new solutions. Many of these products are being taken up by emergency response and public safety organizations.

When it comes to emergency response, technologies such as drones and augmented reality (AV) and virtual reality (VR) are capable of assisting frontline workers in safely executing their tasks. Healthcare professionals and first responders can leverage those same technologies to maintain social distance and support early detection of contamination, and can also use mobile devices to stay in contact with non-urgent medical patients. Read about more use cases for emerging technologies.

Today’s unmanned aircraft systems — better known as drones — can be programmed to accomplish a slew of important jobs. In fact, drones are poised to radically improve many public safety applications, from fire departments using drones with sensors to locate people trapped by fire, to rescue teams sending drones to locate lost hikers in our vast national parks — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Drones themselves are already highly sophisticated and largely commodity technologies. What makes a drone application special are the sensors, software, flight services and data analytics that users bring to bear.

Not that long ago, most police cruisers had a single internet-connected device: a rugged, in-vehicle laptop that allowed officers to securely connect to back-end servers, run license plate numbers and check for outstanding warrants. Today, the number of connected devices in a cruiser is limited only by police officials’ imaginations — or by the in-vehicle…

State and local governments host vast amounts of sensitive data — nothing top secret, but information that contains the intimate details of their citizens’ lives: children’s school records, driving records, voter registration information, contacts with police and paramedics, the list goes on. As more communities lean on the internet and the cloud to create efficiencies…