In recent months, organizations across industries have been forced to adopt new approaches throughout their entire operations. Barbers started giving outdoor haircuts and accepting contactless payments. Schools have equipped their students and instructors with laptops, sent them home and invented new methods of teaching and learning on the fly. Sports teams have even played in empty stadiums, with professional basketball players enclosing themselves in a “bubble” for a COVID-free playoff tournament.

The pressures of the coronavirus pandemic have also led to changes in many data centers. This new business environment has forced companies to embrace modernization, especially those that may have previously lagged behind on needed changes.

Here are four ways that I’m seeing savvy IT and business leaders improve their data center infrastructure and operations through digital transformation.

Education and government organizations are accustomed to strict regulations on data privacy and security. Organizations must stay compliant with regard to how and where they store data; who can access it, how and for what purposes; and how they preserve privacy in data analysis. But this year, leaders in all sectors are taking another look at their data — and, in some cases, deploying master data management solutions — to maintain compliance in remote operations.

One reason for the renewed attention to compliance is that many organizations are collecting new types of data. In schools and colleges, for example, videoconferencing platforms may capture video and audio, along with academic and personal information. Many organizations have managed remote work by expanding their use of cloud computing, which triggers encryption and security protocols for data at rest, in transit and in analysis.

Onsite, organizations are gathering data through technology solutions designed to facilitate safe interactions and maintain social distancing, such as thermal imaging for temperature screenings or video recordings and analytics for occupancy control and contact tracing. All this data must be properly managed and stored.

At this stage of the pandemic, remote work is nothing new for most of us. But thriving in this environment is still very much a work in progress. As we all acclimate to our home lives and work lives combining, organizations must continue to hone their IT strategies to address new security needs. How can they do this? It’s a question my CDW colleagues and I explored in a virtual roundtable we held called “Securing the New Remote Workforce.”

Let’s dive into a few key security takeaways this panel touched on.

Until the 1990s, organizations typically had only one kind of computing device to offer end users: the desktop computer. In more recent years, as laptops shrank in size and smartphones emerged, there were some who believed that devices might one day converge again into a single, unified form factor.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, more device types are available today than ever, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for organizations looking to equip their employees for optimal productivity. Instead, IT and business leaders must make decisions based on their specific business goals.

Here are some of the most common objectives that come up in our conversations with IT leaders at organizations across a variety of industries — and which devices are most likely to help organizations meet them.

Savvy IT shops have long understood the need for effective device management, first through mobile device management (MDM) solutions and then via unified endpoint management (UEM) platforms.

Today, more organizations are opting for “modern device management,” a Microsoft-coined term that describes device and application management delivered via cloud-enabled services. Here’s why organizations are making the move and why this model is likely to stick around.

With many organizations maintaining some or even all of their operations through remote work, users are relying on their devices more than ever.

Access to cloud resources and virtual private network connections are critical to supporting this arrangement, of course, but it’s just as important that workers have devices that function as true business machines. The 10th Gen Intel Core vPro processor series, released earlier this year and available on nearly 200 different devices, gives remote workers the power, security and reliability they would get at the office — and also simplifies management for IT shops. Here are four reasons that business and IT leaders are turning to machines with Intel Core vPro processors.