Manila, Philippines [14 Dec 2020]- The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted and changed the landscape of work in truly wide-reaching, if not remarkable ways. Many business organizations suddenly found themselves reaching into their Plan B shelves to respond to the challenges suddenly brought on by this public health crisis.

And now, enterprises gained a renewed sense of urgency to implement more flexible business models – whether it was a work-from-home scheme, implementing digital structures, or even finally moving operations to an outsourced model.

“Many companies have been putting their feet in and testing the waters when it comes to digitalization. However, the pandemic pushed them roughshod into the pool,” said Jovy Hernandez, ePLDT President & CEO and SVP & Head for PLDT and Smart Enterprise Business Groups. But despite the colorful description of the situation, he nevertheless underscored how it ultimately brought an urgent realization for enterprises.

“They had to either sink or swim, and seeing how many companies are slowly yet steadily recovering, it is evident that many made the right decision,” said Hernandez.

Businesses are striving to look for ways to make their companies resilient in the face of this public health crisis. Experts and pundits have already made their predictions that a wholesale return to the usual workplace is unlikely – and that remote work is here to stay. They also see the need for the acceleration of technological transformation, which is likely already happening for many businesses around the world.

That decision was to embrace the many digital innovations already available to ensure that companies can leverage on technology not only for business continuity, but for survival.

“At PLDT Enterprise, we have been in constant contact with our clients, whether large or small enterprises, to help them assess where they are and where we can come to support in their digital transformation, to enable them to ride out the pandemic’s challenges and build resiliency beyond these uncertain times,” shared Hernandez.

To accomplish this task, PLDT Enterprise not only relies on its extensive product and solution portfolio, but also on its strong partnerships with global technology leaders, among which is Cisco. Together with PLDT Enterprise, Cisco aims to help companies build on their own blueprint for enterprise resiliency, leveraging on Cisco’s expertise as well as best practices.

“At Cisco, we recognize that there are three key principles of a resilient enterprise architecture: not compromising employee safety, security, productivity, and experience; having the flexibility to shift and scale IT capacity, capability, and resources; and ensuring ability to develop and automate new capabilities in an agile manner as the need arises,” said Karrie Ilagan, Managing Director, Cisco Philippines.

“A resilient infrastructure enables companies to be prepared for any future shocks, while also being able to operate as normally as possible in this ‘new normal’ scenario.”

For PLDT Enterprise and Cisco, the resilient architecture for the enterprise focuses on these strategic themes: secure remote work, return to the workplace, flexible multicloud, zero trust security foundation, and end-to-end visibility foundation.

“All these themes are integrated, creating an environment of working that is safe and secure both for the employee and the company,” underscored Ilagan.

As the events of the last months have shown, the need to swim is greater than before. And many have braved the challenges to embrace digitalization.

“We saw double-digit increase in the use of cloud services and double-digit growth of e-commerce, not to mention the continued popularity of videoconferencing platforms,” noted Hernandez. “Truly, digitalization has demonstrated its benefit to ensuring a resilient enterprise, and now the question to be asked is not when to do it, but how.”

And given the combined experience and expertise of PLDT Enterprise and Cisco, it is evident that the two’s longstanding partnership will only serve to bolster support for our recovering enterprises in this new normal.

Cisco was one of the Keystone sponsors of PLDT Enterprise’s recent Philippine Digital Convention 2020. Cisco Systems’ chairman and chief executive officer Chuck Robbins and Cisco Systems’ President for Asia Pacific & Japan - Service Provider Business Sanjay Kaul presented in its Plenary Session as headline speakers.

To know more about PH Digicon 2020, visit pldtenterprise.com/phdigicon2020.