Using hard data as a starting point, we explore the changing world of hybrid work. Guided by our own experiences of neurodivergence and disability, we debate how a more collaborative and accessible approach can drive efficiency across the public sector. In most cases we find that it can be done using technology that governments already possess.  

As a former policy advisor with hands-on experience of shaping equality legislation, these issues are all very close to my heart. 

Aligning leaders and teams to make hybrid work, work

The first episode of the Public Sector Podcast Series, season four, is The Future of Work – Facing the Hybrid Challenge. In it, Microsoft’s Henry Rex, industry advisor, and Rakhi Sachdeva, modern workplace specialist, discuss findings from the latest Work Trends Index report. The numbers reveal a significant disconnect between managers and teams around attitudes to remote working. 87 percent of remote employees reported feeling confident in their productivity at work, while only 12 percent of managers felt the same way about the performance of their remote teams.  

Managers can benefit from investing more trust in their teams and using soft skills to ensure that everyone gets access to the vision and culture of the organisation, which is key to productivity. Helping staff learn new skills ‘on the go’ improves both retention and productivity. We also discuss how a more flexible approach to work can empower individuals who have differing needs to be more effective. Building trust between management and staff enables everyone to align around the public service mission; as Henry Rex points out, people often join an organisation for the money, but stay there for the culture.

Neurodivergence and the innovation challenge

In episode two, Innovate Together, Microsoft account technology strategist, Andrew Boxall, talks about managing change in government and how it can enable staff to embrace more productive and collaborative ways of working. Along the way we discuss our shared experiences of being neurodiverse in the workplace, which provides insights into the challenges of data-driven innovation. 

Addressing bias and differing learning styles enables public servants to collaborate better across organisations. The Innovate Together initiative, supported by Microsoft, aims to accelerate innovation and best practice sharing across the public sector. Trailblazers like Norfolk County Council provide an inspirational example of how advanced techniques such as robotic process automation can drive efficiency.  

Success depends on leaders who set an example and have the initiative to share their learnings. All our guests agreed that making better use of existing tools is a great way to achieve incremental efficiency gains in government, and start building confidence. 

Extending accessibility and inclusion to drive productivity 

In episode three, Accessibility, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, I speak to Maria Grazia Zedda, senior EDI manager at HS2, who is severely deaf. Maria Grazia speaks movingly about overcoming the challenges of disability and hardship when she arrived in London as a young woman. London is also where she found support on her career path and discovered her vocation, improving accessibility in the workplace for everyone. These uplifting experiences are captured in her first novel which is to be published in her native Italy. 

Maria Grazia welcomes the adoption of new technologies that enhance accessibility and inclusion, such as minicoms and auto-captions (Live Captions in Microsoft Teams), the use of which was accelerated by remote working. The momentum now needs to be maintained so that inclusion becomes a fundamental principle of the workplace and the built environment. 

Explore episodes from our previous series 

Our previous three podcast series provide fascinating insights into how efficiency in the public sector could be improved with fresh thinking.  

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season One

In Public Sector Podcast Series – Season 1, guests discuss how citizen services can be enhanced using new digital technologies. Further episodes explore the challenges of managing security across government in a digital world, and overcoming the barriers to legacy estate reduction. Hindsight is also explored as a means of understanding past mistakes and improving government performance in the future.

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season Two

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season 2 builds on these themes, looking at how citizen identity in government can be managed simply and securely. The challenges of hybrid work, and the uses of geospatial data science in the context of the government’s levelling-up agenda, are also up for discussion. A highlight from series two is the episode that draws lessons from the Environment Agency’s experience of digital transformation. Cross-government data sharing also comes under scrutiny.

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season Three

Public Sector Podcast Series – Season 3 digs deeper into data sharing and how citizens engage with government. We assess the government’s Green agenda and the challenge of data literacy in driving innovation across the public sector. And what, we ask, do young people think about entering public service? We devote an episode to figuring out the changing face of apprenticeship in a hybrid world.

Find out more

Successful trial of the Microsoft and Socitm Change Agent programme

Our innovation – Norfolk County Council

Microsoft 365 Collaboration Blueprint for UK Government – Microsoft Industry Blogs – United Kingdom

How the public sector can streamline operations and innovate with intelligent automation – Microsoft Industry Blogs – United Kingdom

About the author

Aaron has worked at Microsoft as an industry advisor for central government for the last four years. Before that he spent twenty-five years in the public sector across a number of departments, in both central and local government, leading on technology policy and strategy. Most notably, he worked on the creation of the Equality Acts (2006 and 2010), the Public Sector Equality Duty and the translation of the EU Accessibility Regulations over to the UK. Outside of his day job, Aaron lectures on accessibility, inclusion and neurodiversity at local institutions and across the wider tech sector.

The post How to make government more effective in a hybrid world: podcast series appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In the current economic environment, banks and other financial services firms recognise the need to embrace digital transformation to get maximum value from their technology investments and do more with less. Leveraging technology also helps businesses to navigate emerging risks while driving sustainable and responsible business outcomes internally and with their customers. But how are they approaching these challenges? Last week I attended Sibos 2022 in Amsterdam, where business leaders, policy makers and technologists came together for deep dive debates and big picture outlooks on the future of the corporate banking market, including lending, trade and treasury solutions, and the related capital markets instruments. The energy and excitement on the pace of innovation was clear and I saw many themes that resonate with where we aim to lead the market in our Microsoft UK Financial Services business.  

Geopolitical tensions, the economic environment, evolving cyber threats, the race to Net Zero, the competitive landscape and ongoing reimagination of business models, modernising policy and regulation, and the continuous innovation of what is possible with people, process and digital technology are driving rapid change in the industry. When managed correctly, this change can unlock new opportunity. 

The industry is leading in many areas of technology, product and operating-model innovation, but a responsible business purpose and sustainable societal outcomes are now firmly embedded as objectives that banks are expected to deliver. “We should not seek innovation for innovation’s sake,” noted HM Queen Máxima of the Netherlands in the opening plenary. “With each new technology, we must always ask ‘What problems are we trying to solve?’” At the same time, we need to ensure any innovation is done securely and collaboratively while being additive to interoperability of data and platforms. The IMF predicts technological fragmentation can cut a country’s GDP by five percent; the benefit of collaborative industry approaches and ecosystem business models is clear. 

Through all the customer, partner, and colleague conversations at Sibos 2022, and while contributing and learning as much as we could about new ideas and technologies, the Microsoft UK Financial Services team took away four main action points: 

1.      Transform securely  

One of the key things that was highlighted by industry leaders was the importance of getting cyber security basics right to enable secure transformation. “The human firewall is the first line of defence,” said Nicolas Trimbour, Head of Fraud Prevention and Chief Data Officer for Cash Management at BNP Paribas. It’s important to educate employees and customers to recognise phishing, scams and ransomware attempts especially while the attach surface grows with increased digitisation and growing ecosystem business models. 

AI/ML solutions can work at high performance across large amounts of data to spot fraud or suspicious activity in transactions and endpoints. An industry-specific cloud solution that uses a completely private data model, while offering full data portability can help organisations as they shift from on-premise to hybrid or cloud-native architectures. At the same time, organisations can benefit from built-in security and compliance offerings that infuse healthy cyber hygiene. 

Our security experts have pulled together resources, training and more to help your teams empower and educate your employees and customers to be cyber aware. This is the right time to focus on this with October being Cyber Security Month. Check out our Cyber Security Awareness Month resources. 

2.      Build a talent and collaboration model that supports your digital ambitions   

Banks need access to the right engineering and digital skills at scale to drive industry digitisation and innovation. This is not just about attracting the talent, but re-skilling and up-skilling current resources and creating an empathetic, flexible culture. I’ve often heard it said that the number one headwind on many banks’ ability to execute on their digital transformation strategies is access to the right talent and skills. “We need to make sure we invest in our people and support them in their growth,” says Erika Irish Brown, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer and Global Head of Talent at Citi.  

At Microsoft, we’re helping financial services institutions give their employees the digital skills they need. Whether that’s showing how decentralised teams can work collaboratively while working remotely, using tools to securely automate processes and workflows, or empowering pro dev, citizen dev and fusion dev teams to develop new apps, processes and reporting to make their work simpler in their domains. With 53 percent of employees more likely to prioritise health and wellbeing over work, leaders must take an empathetic approach to building a hybrid workplace. A culture that embraces flexibility and prioritises wellbeing will build a thriving organisation and drive long-term sustainable growth. This webinar with my colleague Craig Wellman goes into the importance of planning, leadership and culture in transforming financial services. 

3.      Align your ESG objectives to your business value 

The banking industry has a societal obligation to direct funding, capital, investment and lending to businesses in the real economy that will move the needle positively on ESG measures and on carbon reduction. And not only do customers, stakeholders, investors, regulators and governments expect it, but it’s also good for business. “$97 trillion needs to be invested to get to net zero. That’s a massive opportunity. It’s the most strategic and important thing we can do as an industry,” says Marisa Drew, CSO at Standard Chartered. 

The best way to start building effective ESG strategies is to tie it into your business value. Some institutions are already including their sustainability results in their financial statements. However, the industry faces challenges. A lack of global standard around climate reporting, mixed with slow manual processes and siloed data can affect how quickly you can build an effective strategy. “We don’t have perfect data, but we have actionable data,” says Gill Lofts, Global Financial Services Sustainable Finance Leader at EY. 

A unified and resilient cloud infrastructure like Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability can help you gain visibility across your data, drive efficiency, track and minimise your environmental impact and create sustainable value chains. We also need to drive more cross-industry collaboration.

“This is a planet-scale problem that needs planet-scale innovation and collaboration,” says Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft.

When we made our sustainability commitment in 2020, we also decided to share our learnings, results and practices, and increase our focus on supporting our customers drive their own ESG agendas. 

4.      Lead on innovation that can open new sources of value  

Recent innovations are increasingly moving from POC to production adoption across digital assets such as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). 

While AI has been leveraged in organisations for a long time to reduce risk and streamline operations, organisations need to take a novel approach to AI to create new avenues of growth. “People don’t think of AI as a way to get to a new digital business,” says Sameena Shah Managing Director, AI Research Executive, and Chief Transformation Officer for Client Onboarding at JP Morgan Chase. “You need to bring people with a business mindset together with people with AI knowledge.” These groups, known as fusion teams, can help organisations deploy solutions up to two and a half times faster than siloed teams. 

“Cash as a form of payment has been declining, but cash in circulation is growing. We have also seen over the past 10 years the rise of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies and CBDCs,” says Marion Laboure, Senior Economist at Deutsche Bank. 

One thing digitisation can do is help with financial inclusion. The 1.7 billion people who don’t have access to financial services can potentially use CBDC to start using financial services without a bank account. 

NFTs are currently used to tie ownership to a digital asset. However, as they evolve, it could allow the construction of the end asset to be more sophisticated. “That’s when it becomes more interesting to us in Finance. We can look at a new type of securitised asset, a new type of yield profile that may or may not be totally uncorrelated with traditional markets and assets,” said John Egan, CEO of L’Atelier at BNP Paribas. In fact, the US Securities and Exchange Commission are already looking into NFTs as a security. With no intermediaries, Decentralised Finance (DeFi) is less complex and more agile than the traditional central counterparty model. However, it is probably riskier. Experts suggest a hybrid model for DeFi, with the right regulatory guiderails to manage AML, fraud, conduct risk, and cybercrime. 

“Web3 and blockchain technologies are unique because they create a different, efficient way of executing processes. They can be best served to decrease complexity, increase security and transparency,” says Willayna Banner, Microsoft’s Head of Web3/Blockchain in Financial Services. Learn how organisations are using blockchain to transform functions such as trade finance and commercial specialty insurance. 

Collaborating for industry growth and responsible innovation 

As we shared these thoughts and ideas on the future of banking at Sibos 2022, a recurring theme was industry collaboration across the widest perimeter of stakeholders. To drive growth while being resilient, secure and compliant in our changing industry, our key priorities must be removing friction, increasing interoperability and improving the service experience for our customers, empowering our teams, and driving inclusive, sustainable innovation. 

Find out more 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 

Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service Webinar for Financial Services: The changing role of the Digital Contact Centre

Rethinking the Customer Experience | Microsoft

About the author 

Niall is responsible for defining and leading Microsoft’s strategy for Financial Services in the UK. His focus is on helping Microsoft’s customers’ address industry-wide challenges, adapt to new regulatory frameworks and achieve business transformation through the adoption of Microsoft technology and partner solutions. He works to deliver on the cost, growth, risk and regulatory agenda front-to-back through the enterprise. 

Niall has experience in consulting, partner ecosystems, and large programme delivery in Financial Services. Niall has focused on operating model transformation and technology solutions for business challenges in Banking and Capital Markets, often in the regulatory change context. He has worked mostly with international banking groups and has lived in Hong Kong and London. 

The post The future of banking: How to stay innovative, collaborative and secure appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Organisations that can connect and use their data are more resilient and adaptable, driving sustainable growth. But how? We’ve identified three ways your organisation can leverage data insights to turn into action.

The hybrid world of work

We all have a lived experience of hybrid working, and it’s here to stay. In our latest Work Trend Index, we found that:

_{53% of people are likely to consider transitioning to hybrid in the year ahead if they haven’t already}

_{53% of employees are more likely to prioritise health and wellbeing over work.}

This means organisations need a new digital fabric for collaboration that brings together both digital and physical spaces. One that connects people and empowers them to balance their career and their wellbeing.  Organisations won’t be able to scale to this transition without a strong understanding of data.

Unilever provides their people – including individuals, managers, and leaders – with data-driven, privacy-protected visibility with Microsoft Viva. These data insights help Unilever improve the employee experience and promote greater work-life balance.

The hyper-connected business

We need that next level of real-time hyper-connectivity between businesses, and between consumers and businesses, where data and intelligence flow freely to tackle the challenges of supply and demand.​

According to our research, 80 percent of companies suffer with significant data silos. This prevents them from gaining meaningful insight to make business decisions. But by ensuring your data strategy combines the right capabilities and the right culture, you can identify opportunities, better serve customers, transform your products, empower employees, drive sustainable results and optimise operations. 

Access and unify your data

The more siloed your data, the harder it is to accomplish data governance. When you harness the streams of data being created on a secure platform, enabling better decision making and transformative processes.

Analyse, predict and orchestrate

Once you have unified your data you can leverage AI and Machine Learning. Run big data analytics to predict customer intent to purchase and identify segments that are at risk of churning. This can help identify new, or even protect revenue streams, improve operational efficiencies, create sustainable supply chains and drive a better overall quality of service.

Activate and measure

Take these insights and democratise access through your organisation. The people who will best put the data to use are the ones who deal with it day-to-day. By allowing both front and back-end employees access to that data, they can create low/no code apps that streamline operations and deliver better customer experiences.

Heineken gives their frontline employees customer data insights directly on a unified platform with Azure Synapses and Dynamics 365. This enables their sellers to gain much richer insights about their customer’s preferences to deliver the best possible purchase recommendations and provide a much more tailored buying experience.

Omnichannel customer experience

Technology has shaped both the online and offline experience for customers. And the more data silos organisations have, the more frustrated the customer becomes.

A hyper-connected business can link all the customer touchpoints together to create a 360-degree view. Employees can access this, meaning they can provide the best experience to the customer, no matter the point of they journey they are in, or how they’re getting in touch. AI and Machine Learning can then help drive richer data insights that can be used to delight and build trust.

Alpha XR Boots Alliance balances data and privacy to deliver more engaging and personalised experiences, to their patients and customers. By dramatically enhancing their customer personalisation, they can deliver the best tailored offers and content to the right customer, in the right context, at the right time and through the right channels across the entire journey.

Build sustainable growth with data insights

The events over the past several years have shown us that organisations that are able to connect and use their data are more robust and able to adapt to changing environments, harness potential and drive competitive advantage.​

Through empowering employees with the right culture, unifying and optimising your data, and building the omnichannel customer experience, you can turn data insights into action.

Find out more

Imagine business powered by data

Put your most important asset to work

The post How to turn data insights into action appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Frontline workers have suffered ongoing disruption throughout the pandemic which has led to considerable exhaustion and burn out. Increased working hours and pressure means they are also likely to experience a feeling of disconnection from their organisation and their team. As a result, organisations need to support healthcare staff wellbeing. Based on the Work Trend Index Special Report, one of the main focuses organisations should have when it comes to building an inclusive team culture is ensuring frontline workers have the digital tools to stay connected to core organisational messages and resources.

Improving connections to organisational knowledge

Technology like Microsoft Viva Connections can play an important role in shaping the organisational culture to include frontline workers. Viva Connections brings together relevant news, conversations and resources from around your organisation into one place within Teams. It provides both a desktop and mobile experience. Viva Connections is built on the current Microsoft 365 ecosystem within your organisation. It’s powered by SharePoint to help inform, engage, and empower the hybrid workforce. The Viva Connections experience is fully customisable to your organisation’s requirements. Living in Teams, this allows all employees to access information no matter what device they are using and where they are. As a result, all healthcare workers can complete their roles without the need to search for different websites, use different and outdated applications or load resources and tools which only work on a PC.

An improved and updated intranet brought into the flow of daily work in Microsoft Teams provides a simple way for health organisations to deliver all relevant news to frontline workers. It can also create a safe and collaborative space for healthcare teams. This can support organisations in their efforts of keeping employees engaged which can result in higher levels of retention.

Every day, new healthcare regulations are put in place by governments. Often, healthcare workers struggle to find the latest government regulation or guidance and may struggle to pro-actively locate this information. With Viva connections, organisational leaders know they can deliver this content in a uniform experience to all employees, regardless of role.

Delivering connections to new employees

Viva Connections can be particularly useful for new healthcare workers. When joining an organisation it is often difficult to embrace and understand the organisation’s culture and mission. Especially remotely when on the frontline and not in an office setting. Viva Connections provides a virtual resource portal for a new healthcare worker. It supports onboarding through a customisable dashboard which can be personalised to different employee roles. The dashboard delivers a tailored view of these resources through adaptive cards. These can be targeted directly to frontline workers and their own needs. Popular use cases can include weblinks to view pay and benefits, submit holiday requests, view and manage shifts or access time sheets. All these are opened within the Teams browser on a mobile device.

Through the dashboard experience, Viva Connections also provides an extensible platform, where 3^rd party integration such as ServiceNow, LifeWorks or Talentsoft can be plugged directly through adaptive cards. This means that employees can access and complete even more tasks directly from the Connections app. As a result, healthcare workers can save large amounts of time. This is because they no longer need to search the organisations intranet for scattered resources.

Take control of your organisation’s internal communication strategy

In a hybrid working world where healthcare workers are likely to be more disconnected than ever from their organisations, both information workers working from home and workers using mobile devices on the frontline have benefitted from using Microsoft Teams. Now, in this evolution of Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections can ensure healthcare workers stay in touch with their organisation’s latest news, legal requirements and their organisation’s mission and purpose.

To learn more about Viva Connections please connect with Edward Adamson and Ioana Marinescu on LinkedIn. Or, contact your Microsoft account team and we can organise a Viva Connections envisioning session.

Find out more

Get started with Microsoft Viva Connections

Work Trend Index Special Report

3 ways technology can help rebuild your frontline workforce

What’s a Simple Definition of Employee Engagement?

Viva Connections mobile and new partner integrations are now generally available

About the authors

Edward is currently a Modern Work Specialist working with healthcare organisations across the UK, helping on their journey towards digital transformation. Focussing on hybrid working, frontline technologies and wellbeing and productivity management, connect with Edward on LinkedIn to follow content relating to healthcare and Microsoft 365 optimisation.

Ioana works with healthcare organisations across the UK to improve their journey towards digital transformation using Microsoft 365 technologies. She helps healthcare organisations utilise Microsoft Teams to connect multi-disciplinary communities across the organisation, bring wellbeing and productivity management into the flow of everyday work and surface knowledge and learning across the organisation.

The post How to keep frontline healthcare workers connected with digital technology appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

We have a year of exciting new things to come. As we enter into the month of January, this is a great time to look at new personal and professional goals for the upcoming year. With working from home still a relevant part of our lives this is a great time to look at how we communicate, as well as ways we can freshen it up to increase collaboration and communication within our teams.

Let’s look at some ways we can improve our connection to the people in our teams and our customers.

• Daily Stand-ups: While this is something that’s traditionally done in the developer community, it’s been something that I’ve been encouraging and implementing into my IT Pro/Operational teams as well. These can be done on a daily basis, or maybe 2-3 times a week, depending on where we are with a project.
  • Hold a daily 30 minute meeting in the morning (this might be someone’s afternoon if you’re working across time zones).
  • Each person states a) What they worked on yesterday b) What they’re working on today c) Are there any blockers? – in a round robin style.
  • After each person in the team has quickly answered the above, open it up to team discussion or address the blockers.
• Weekly team lunches and morale building events: Encourage your team to have coffee or lunch together for 30 – 60 mins. Another idea is to set up a team morale event – quiz style fun, a team building activity, or an hour to talk about everyone’s technical side projects (i.e. home automation, learning a new tech or language).
• First 15 minutes: Use the first 15 minutes of team meetings to chit-chat about anything, keeping in mind that you’re taking 15 minutes off the planned agenda.
• Join a group channel on Teams or Discord that is for fun only. Maybe call it ‘watercooler’ or ‘random’ – whatever works for your team.
• Join online tech community channels like the ITOps Discord channel.

This is a great time to not only re-connect to those around us, but also get further involved into the tech community. Communication is now more important than ever. You can also check out how to integrate Microsoft Teams into GitHub or Azure DevOps for full project traceability and communication for your teams’ deliverables. Microsoft Teams has the ability to hook into many third party applications.

In case you missed this in December, the annual Festive Tech Calendar was put together by the community, for the community. You can catch up on all the missed episodes on their YouTube Channel.

There is also the Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge that offers challenges around various technical topics:

• Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
• Azure Data Scientist Associate
• Azure AI Fundamentals
• …and more!

Have a happy 2022! Here’s to looking forward to the new year!

The post IT Pro: How you and your team can improve communication this year appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

At Microsoft, cybersecurity is one of our highest priorities. This goes back to Bill Gates’ Trustworthy Computing Initiative almost 20 years ago. It’s steered the company’s direction ever since. In the UK, security is at the heart of all we do. We recently expanded our security teams, doubled our investment in partners and created a new Security business group to further help our customers protect themselves against cyberthreats.   

It’s never been a better time to build cyber safety. Here’s some tips to build your security strategy:

Understand your security posture to build cyber safety

To understand where you are in your journey, it’s important to understand your organisation’s security posture – Microsoft Secure Score can help you find your next steps and priorities.

We also want to help you ensure your employees have the security skills to support your goals. That’s why we have a range of resources to help everyone build confidence:

• Get employee training
• Join a cybersecurity workshop
• Take a cybersecurity learning path

And what are we doing to help? Over the next five years, Microsoft has quadrupled its investment and has committed to a $20bn investment to help our customers become secure and trusted, enabling growth and innovation.

Find out more

3 ways Microsoft helps build cyber safety awareness for all

4 ways to build cyber resilience

About the author

Paul leads the Security, Compliance and Identity business for Microsoft UK and is passionate about helping organisations protect themselves from cyberthreats. The risk of financial loss, data exposure and reputational damage has never been higher. Paul and his team are dedicated to the role that Microsoft technologies can play in helping organisations protect themselves, their people and their data.  

The post 4 ways to build cyber safety in your organisation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The evolving threat landscape has highlighted how attackers are refining their tactics and techniques. It also shows just how far they’re willing to go to disrupt organisations with cyberattacks.

Let’s take the example of human-operated ransomware, and the deliberate targeting of critical infrastructure. This is designed to cause as much financial, operational and societal impact as possible. Additionally, this is often compounded by the pressure from consumers, media and government – and one where core supply chains are cut off or severely disrupted. While the motivation of the cyberattack varies, there is a rise of recklessness. Attackers go beyond disruption into destruction as they learn how to combat and evade security defences. This puts business leaders in a position where they feel they have limited options. With the response likely to play out in the public domain, they often feel like they must pay the extortion demands either to restore services or prevent further disruption.

Enterprise resilience is needed to recover from human-operated cyberattacks. This goes beyond just cyber resilience. It requires a multi-faceted business, technology and operational response to recover services as quickly and effectively as possible across all domains. Resilience is the ability of the business to recover from failures and continue to function, in adverse conditions. It’s not about avoiding failures. It’s about taking proactive action to detect and respond to failures in a way that reduces downtime or data loss.

In the Microsoft Societal Resilience research program, we define resilience as the capacity to anticipate, absorb, and adapt to disruption. As Dr Peter Lee, Microsoft CVP of Research and innovations, says: “If we don’t acknowledge our risks, we can’t anticipate and prepare for them”. This is especially true in today’s world of radical innovation, where the threat actors often move faster than organisations do.

Planning for enterprise resilience against cyberattacks

Business continuity and information protection are absolute requirements for every business. But it can often entail cost, complexity, compliance, and resource to maintain. Using a cloud-based strategy helps to mitigate many of these issues. Building reliable and secure systems in the cloud is a shared responsibility. The reliability ‘of ‘the cloud is the responsibility of the cloud service provider. The reliability ‘in’ the cloud is the responsibility of the organisation. However, according to the National Cyber Security Centre, only three in 10 businesses have business continuity plans that cover cybersecurity.

How to build a secure cloud strategy

Those new to cloud should begin with Azure’s Cloud Adoption Framework, to determine business drivers and strategy. The Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework is a set of guiding tenants that architects, developers and solution owners can use to build and optimise reliable, secure and resilient services in the cloud.

Design for reliability and security

Designing for reliability requires an assume failure mindset. Designing for security requires an assume compromise mindset.

Cybersecurity is hard to mitigate for. Adversaries are working to counteract the business continuity strategy by actively adapting and navigating the controls that the business has implemented. If a plan is too rigid and does not anticipate change, it can often fail as the business is not able to react and pivot quickly enough to the ferocity of change or cyberattacks.

Machine learning and AI can take the pressure off IT or security teams with real-time threat detection and automation. This allows them to focus on higher value tasks, such as designing resilient workloads.

Choose the right workload

Designing workloads that are resistant to both natural disasters and malicious human intervention such as cyberattacks requires a thoughtful combination of high availability, disaster recovery and backup solutions. Across the whole environment, you need to consider how likely the primary control is to fail and the potential organisational risk if it does. Additionally, you need to counteract any of these with mitigating factors.

• High availability (HA): The ability of the application or service to continue running in a healthy state, without significant downtime.
• Disaster recovery (DR): The ability to recover from rare but wide-scale failures. For example, service disruption that affects an entire region.
• Data backup: A critical part of resiliency, distinct from storage redundancy solutions.

You can specifically address HA and DR needs with storage redundancy solutions that simultaneously replicate data and services to an alternative location. However, a secondary location can be impacted at the same time a near-real-time attack encrypts data in a primary location. This results in data loss or corruption.

When designing a backup solution for business-critical data in the cloud consider a tertiary, immutable backup (write-once-read-many). This is both physically and logically held away from any primary and secondary backups. As a result, there is another layer of protection against data loss, corruption, or malicious encryption. This is a good option for highly sensitive and regulated entities who are required to legally hold data. Azure Backup provides security features to help protect backup data even after deletion; one such feature is soft delete. If a backup is accidentally or maliciously deleted, soft delete retains it for an extra 14 days. Remember, regularly validate and test backup and restore procedures.

Protect privileged identities against cyberattacks

Often one of the most overlooked part of resilience is protecting the identities that have access to backups. As a result, compromised accounts can be used maliciously to encrypt or delete backups. Even in the example of soft delete, a compromised account with the appropriate rights can disable the feature before deleting backups.

Attackers deliberately target these resources because it impacts the ability to recover. Mitigate this by granting accounts the minimum privilege required to accomplish their assigned tasks. Limit the number of accounts with access to backups (but with a break-glass account included). Protect these with multi-factor authentication (MFA), which stops 99.9% of account compromise attacks. You should also consider just-in-time and just-enough access using dedicated privileged access workstations (PAWS). Log and monitor all changes for verification and compliance.

Validate your response to cyberattacks

To truly know if your strategy can hold up against cyberattacks, you need to successfully measure reliability and security to and understand the resilience of that system. This means testing end-to-end workloads against a range of severe but plausible scenarios.

Chaos engineering is the practice of subjecting cloud applications and services to real world failures and dependency disruptions to build, measure and improve resilience. Fault injection is the deliberate introduction of a failure into a system to validate robustness and error handling.

We use fault injection at Microsoft to induce a major failure or disaster and validate both the recovery and incident management processes. We place strict access controls around this capability to prevent accidents or malicious attacker abuse to safeguard and limit the impact of the testing. This enables the business and IT to consider and prepare for a range of scenarios that determine the robustness and design of the overall solution in a safe environment. It also increases the resilience and confidence in Azure and our services.

Microsoft Ignite 2021 provided a first look at Azure Chaos Studio which is our upcoming native chaos engineering and fault injection service. This will help organisations to measure, understand, and improve the resilience of their Azure applications.

Anticipate and adapt

Organisations require a level of preparedness that anticipates and adapts to a range of scenarios, whether accidental or malicious. The strategy needs to be flexible to adapt to the evolving threat landscape and be capable of delivering effective and scalable enterprise-wide recovery.

The good news is that cloud architectures can help improve enterprise resilience goals whilst enabling effective business continuity.

Find out more

Learn more about backup and disaster recovery

Human-operated ransomware attacks: A preventable disaster

Rapidly protect against ransomware and extortion

Resources to empower your development team

Cybersecurity best practices to implement highly secured devices

Introduction to cybersecurity learning path 

Data discovery, classification and protection learning path

About the authors

Sarah Armstrong-Smith is Chief Security Advisor in Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Solutions Area. She principally works with  strategic customers across Europe, to help them evolve their security strategy and capabilities to support digital transformation and cloud adoption.

Sarah has a background in business continuity, disaster recovery, data protection and privacy, as well as crisis management. Combining these elements means she operates holistically to understand the cybersecurity landscape, and how this can be proactively enabled to deliver effective operational resilience.

Sarah is recognised as one of the most influential women in UK Tech and UK cybersecurity. She regularly contributes to thought leadership and industry publications.

Previously lead investigator for Microsoft’s detection and response team (DART), Lesley Kipling has spent more than 17 years responding to our customers’ largest and most impactful cybersecurity incidents. As Chief Cybersecurity Advisor, she now provides customers, partners and agencies around the globe with deep insights into how and why security incidents happen, how to harden defences and more importantly, how to automate response and contain attacks with the power of the cloud and machine learning. She holds a Master of Science in Forensic Computing from Cranfield University in the United Kingdom.

The post How to future-proof and secure your organisation against cyberattacks appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Osborne Clarke is an international legal practice with headquarters in London, and offices around the world. The Firm’s goal is to help clients succeed in tomorrow’s world. One of the ways it does that is to equip all its people with the right digital tools, right processes and empower them with the right skills to use those tools effectively.

To empower employees, they took a different approach to the typical linear style taken for digital modernisation.  “When you’re trying to fundamentally change the way people deliver work, its different,” explains Nathan Hayes, IT Director at Osborne Clarke. By directly engaging with people to solve business issues, Osborne Clarke was able to build internal champions. At the same time, they are improving processes and developing best practices to enable its people to work smarter.

Speed up digital modernisation and empower employees

Osborne Clarke had already started to modernise its business ahead of the UK’s shift to remote working in 2020. Employees were already familiar with Microsoft Teams. However, the shift in ways of working was a real driver for tech adoption because they had to use tools like Microsoft Teams to engage and work. “It’s about winning hearts and minds. People were already engaging with technology in ways they never had before,” says Nathan.

Standardising client experiences and ways of working

Osborne Clarke’s Matter Management Group has been a key part of building the processes behind its digital collaboration modernisation. For legal firms, the managing of a matter from conception to delivery needs to not only meet client expectations, but be transparent, compliant and secure to meet employee expectations too.

Osborne Clarke identified that all its people had a different way of working. This created challenges around the consistency of client experiences across the organisation. The Firm’s Matter Management Group set out to standardise the way they delivered legal services across the organisation, taking learnings from the broader business on how they could work more effectively.

“I have worked with the Matter Management Group and the skill set provided is valuable. There is training support on hand when needed and there is an understanding of how legal teams work which means there’s an appreciation of the comments/concerns we raise and the Group is able to explain the technology easily.”

Partner, Corporate, Osborne Clarke

Connecting business silos to aid transparency and reduce risk

Ensuring transparency over processes and documents is one of the most important factors for legal firms to consider. In a traditional firm, documents are paper-based or baked into business silos making transparency difficult to audit and manage.

When connecting business silos together, legal firms can gain visibility over document sharing, updates, and more. As a result of their modernisation, Osborne Clarke can track when a document is pulled out of the management system and shared with clients via email or on Microsoft Teams to manage risk, create visibility and improve client experiences.

Ensuring security and regulatory compliance

Like many industries, security is highly important for the legal sector. Legal firms need to ensure they not only meet the expectations of clients, regulators, and the business, but exceed them. Firms must ensure any technology meets risk and compliance requirements, while being able to take advantage of innovative solutions to transform client experiences.

“We went through a full due diligence exercise in terms of understanding where our audit trails were, what our discovery options were, and where we engage our risk and compliance team. We have to know that we’ve got an absolutely robust platform,” says Nathan.

By conducting a thorough audit of the platform and understanding their audit trails, Osborne Clarke was able to outline where there was a reliance on employees to meet their statutory and regulatory obligations and where they could leverage technology more effectively to save time.

Demonstrating tangible use cases to empower employees

The Matter Management Group worked with teams in the business directly to help solve challenges around working practices and demonstrate how Microsoft Teams can help resolve them. By showing the value of digital technology first-hand within the context of the real day-to-day challenges they were facing, there was a greater chance it would be used. As a result, that they would share their new found understanding more broadly with other colleagues.

“We had a London partner who was looking to improve profitability. We sat down with him and showed him the technologies that could help. He decided he wanted to try Planner and Teams. Then, he codified an entire matter within 24 hours. He sent it out to his team members, assigning tasks in planner. And that was the start of delivering benefits in terms of visibility and in terms of accuracy,” says Nathan.

“I have used Planner within Teams to create the M&A Playbook. The task list is flexible so can be amended for each deal. It can also be assigned to specific people, prioritised in terms of urgency and can set due dates which can be moved if necessary,” says a Partner at Osborne Clarke. “I have found Planner to be incredibly useful and have noticed that junior lawyers are more proactive as they can see the matter set out in tasks from start to finish.”

“Some things I’ve really liked about Planner – it’s very easy to set up and edit the tasks and buckets; It’s useful to be able to tailor what information appears on each task card. For example, on some that are time sensitive I will choose to include deadline details, or if we agree something with the other side which we may need to keep track of later, I can include a small note under the relevant task.”

Associate, Project Finance

Bringing employees along the journey

For Nathan’s team, the most important thing about digital modernisation is to make sure employees are part of the process. This is why the implementation was so successful. The Matter Management Group works directly within business teams to solve build solutions. This means they were not only able to demonstrate the benefit of digital technology on existing processes, but they were also able to equip employees with the right digital skills to work alongside the technology.

“Its great to see how Osborne Clarke have integrated Microsoft Teams in to the firms critical business processes to not only enhance their lawyers productivity but to engage with their clients in a more consistent and effective way. It demonstrates how technology can enable effective change in a secure way when people and processes are closely aligned.”

Karen Grumbt, Account Executive, Legal Sector, Microsoft UK

The future

Nathan believes Osborne Clarke’s journey is far from over. Looking forward, there are ways to automate workflows or paper-based processes. This will not only save time but reduce errors and empowers employees to spend more time with clients.

The secret of Osborne Clarke’s digital modernisation success is its people-first approach. Engaging directly with teams to build solutions that show immediate benefits creates advocates within the business. In addition, ensuring the processes are secure, compliant and transparent, builds not only strong digital proficiency, but creates a more open, collaborative culture.

Find out more

Learn more about Osborne Clarke

Embrace the new world of work eBook

5 ways the legal sector can innovate and empower employees in the future of work

Resources for your development team

Watch the on-demand sessions from Microsoft Build:

Extending the Microsoft Teams experience

Build solutions that span across Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections and SharePoint

About the author

Nathan is IT Director at Osborne Clarke. He has over fifteen years of experience in the strategic delivery of IT into numerous law firms including CMS Cameron McKenna and Bevan Brittan amongst others. Nathan is an active member of the Legal IT community and makes regular contributions at conferences and to a range of legal publications. Prior to moving into the legal sector, he enjoyed extensive experience in a similar capacity within the global distribution sector. When away from the office, Nathan can usually be found surfing whilst attached to a kite, and occasionally being dragged out to sea in a tangle of lines.

Karen is an experienced Account Executive focussed on the Legal Sector at Microsoft. With over five years’ experience working with global law firms, Karen works closely with customers to drive digital transformation and enable them to realise greater business benefit through Microsoft technology.

The post How law firms can securely empower employees and optimise processes appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

It will take time for the new hybrid workplace to emerge. At Microsoft, we continue to take a people and design-centred approach to hybrid working. To help leaders build an inclusive hybrid workplace, we focus on the perspectives of four employees. We look at their wants and needs, their current situation, and what their desired normal future of work looks like.

• Balancing work and home: Sarah’s story
• Building inclusivity and accessibility: Raj’s story
• Staying connected while apart: Mike’s story
• Starting a new career: Veronica’s story

Balancing work and home: Sarah’s story

Sarah is an architect in the construction industry. She is a professional, a wife and mother, and the primary carer of two daughters. As a result, she finds balancing work and home demands a constant struggle.

Pre-remote working

Before our shift to remote working, Sarah often struggled to achieve a healthy balance between her professional and family life. Long days could involve up to four hours in the car. There were design meetings, planning meetings and site visits to attend, often at multiple locations. Sometimes she would get home late. That meant she would miss the opportunity to catch up with her family. This made her feel disconnected and like she was failing at home.

Remote working

Not having to travel has been a revelation for Sarah. Home schooling is difficult to manage. However, the extra 10+ hours a week Sarah gains by not travelling means she can spend more time with her family. Also, she has more time to keep her clients happy and projects on track.

As everyone got used to remote working, there were some initial misunderstandings and mistakes. However, everyone quickly adapted.

Whereas she would do this informally in the office, smaller scheduled meetings and more regular diarised check-ins helped Sarah stay on top of her work. Unfortunately, Sarah’s broadband was disconnected for two days and that had a big impact on everyone – work, school and entertainment were all affected. The family have since changed provider and upgraded their package to make the connection more reliable.

Sarah’s desired normal in the future of work

A year on, Sarah does occasionally miss the buzz and connection of the office. It’s made her recognise the importance of face-to-face connection. But through remote working, she has found a work life balance that was unobtainable before. Her firm are discussing their return to workplace strategy. Sarah hopes she can continue to be empowered to meet her client, project and family needs in a way that works well for her.

Building inclusivity and accessibility: Raj’s story

Raj is a partner at a management consulting firm. He has a late acquired disability. This has impacted the way he delivers his work.

Pre-remote working

Raj was happy with his career progression. However, his late acquired disabilities meant he faced a lot of challenges delivering his work. Unable to use public transport or stay overnight in new cities without elaborate carer arrangements, Raj had a lot of restrictions in terms of the customers he could serve.

For the customers he could serve, Raj had to put in a lot of effort to manage travel arrangements. Also, he had to deal with all the unknowns that come with new locations. He remembers several occasions when he had to wake up at 4am to be part of morning face to face meetings. To do that, his wife needs to assist him, as the carer can’t attend that early. At times, he would travel over three hours for a two-hour face to face customer meeting and make the same arduous journey back. There were several incidents where he came across meeting rooms that were not accessible. In all this, he never felt that he was doing anything extraordinary because that was the only way he could get work done – that was his normal.

Remote working

2020 changed Raj’s whole perspective about workplace productivity. It also changed his opinion on the meaning of equitable environments for people with disabilities. The rapid pace of digital transformation enabled an unprecedented level of digital inclusion in our society.

Overnight, everything became more accessible. All those customers that Raj couldn’t travel to are now in his reach. With all the time saved he has become much more productive. His wellbeing has also improved, as he no longer worries about accessibility when travelling to meet clients. This year, Raj is handling three times the workload compared to last year. He still has time to publish new intellectual property, mentor colleagues and students and advise start-ups. He also has more time to spend with his family.

Raj’s desired normal in the future of work

What’s been brought home to Raj is the power of technology. It’s a major catalyst to enable the full participation of people with disabilities in the digital economy. Raj realises he has a voice and role in taking this opportunity forward and removing the barriers to a truly inclusive digital future of work.

Staying connected while apart: Mike’s story

Mike is an assistant buyer for a large online retailer. He is single and has no dependents. This job is the first time he has lived away from home.

Pre-remote working

Mike has been an assistant buyer for two years. After graduating from a university – which was close to his hometown – he took the brave step of leaving his friends and family. He moved 200 miles for his job. His working life was spent either in the office, on the road, or travelling across Asia with colleagues looking for the next great product.

Mike’s social life also circulated around work. He caught up with colleagues over a coffee, is a member of the company sports team and enjoyed team socials. While Mike lived alone, most of his time was spent with others either at work or in social situations.

Remote working

In 2020, Mike shifted to working from home. Due to both his work and personal technology, he felt he could be just as productive or even more productive than when he was travelling. In the beginning, he was enjoying not having to travel. He was able to do things that he did not have time for before. After a few weeks however, he started to realise how much he relied on work for social interaction and began to feel isolated. After four months, the social isolation took its toll. Mike decided to move back home.

Mike’s desired normal in the future of work

Mike can see that there are plans to return to the office. Soon, things will start to go back to some kind of normality. He is looking forward to getting back into the office. He’s also starting to travel again as he has missed those elements of the role. However, Mike has proven that he can be productive from anywhere. While remote working has made some things complex, he believes hybrid working is the way to go.

Mike has been speaking to his manager about the possibility of a home working contract. He doesn’t want to permanently relocate again. In addition, he believes the company would get more value from this arrangement. Mike has decided that if his employer forces him to move closer to the office then he will have to look for a new position. The market for his skills appears buoyant.

Starting a new career: Veronica’s story

Veronica is an intern at a large tech company. She is excited to pick up experiences and skills which would help her secure her first job once she has obtained her degree.

Pre-remote working

Veronica’s excitement to start her work placement turned to dread in 2020. She had moved to a new city to be near her workplace. She was looking forward to onboarding into her role, meeting her colleagues and getting settled in. Yet government restrictions meant that all offices closed.

Remote working

On-boarding into her new role was difficult. There was great supporting infrastructure in the form of digital platforms, training, and tools. However, Veronica felt she would have benefited from more 1:1 guidance and mentoring, especially whilst she was settling in. Instead, she found that her days were full of meetings. Whilst everyone was generally helpful, it could at times be overwhelming. She was sometimes unsure of whether she was prioritising the right tasks. This made her feel anxious.

Veronica’s desired normal in the future of work

Veronica hopes the world will learn from the last year. Digital tools are a great benefit and enable ‘work anywhere’ flexibility. However, she has found as someone early in career, that sometimes working in the same space as her team can have benefits too, such as building a greater sense of camaraderie and connection. She feels that if she had had more help in her on-boarding it would have helped to build her confidence faster and to accomplish more during her work placement.

Designing the hybrid workspace in the future of work

The future of work needs to be intentionally focused on three things:

• The work we will do.
• How we will work.
• The value the work creates.

The workplace shouldn’t be focussed on location. Nor should it be driven by the personal preferences and habits of the influential few. With just these four stories, we can see how different individual preferences are. But what connects them? Digital technology.

By taking a people-oriented approach we can design the future of work. We’ll build strategies that work for everyone. Investing in digital tools opens the door to the opportunity but investing in a digital culture realises it. Leaders have a pivotal role to play in enabling the future of work. They can empower others to do their jobs in a way that works for them, whilst also satisfying the needs and wants of the customers they serve.

Find out more

Microsoft Viva: The employee experience platform

Create an agile and innovative hybrid workplace

Enable the anywhere office

3 steps to build a successful hybrid working framework

About the authors

Prajakt is a management consulting professional with more than 17 years of experience in serving large global clients. He specialises in business consulting and advisory services; driving digital modernisation for customers.
Currently, Prajakt is an Industry Advisory Lead for the Local and Regional Government sector in Microsoft Services.
Previously, Prajakt was heading the Europe consulting services for Tech Mahindra serving large global customers like British Telecom, Vodafone, Telefonica etc., in addition to leading implementations for various smart city initiatives across the UK.

Terry Room is currently a Managing Architect for Microsoft Consulting Services in the UK. With over 20 years of technology industry experience, he leads a cross disciplinary team of consulting architects and digital advisors, with a focus on driving large scale business and technology transformation with strategic enterprise customers through the design of compelling business cases, resilient technology architectures, and transformation programmes which deliver sustainable business value.

The post The hybrid workplace: How organisations can build the future of work, inclusively appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.