Digitalization During the Pandemic — What We Learned in Three Months

March 2020. On Friday, we left the office “for a few days.” It’s June and most of the team is still working from home. What changed in those three months? Everything. And surprisingly, much of it for the better.

Week 1: Panic and VPN¶

Our VPN was sized for 20 concurrent connections. On Monday morning, 150 people connected. It crashed. Crisis meeting (over the phone, because nobody knew how to use Teams yet). By Wednesday, we had a new VPN infrastructure running on Azure — auto-scaling, split tunneling, MFA.

Lesson: disaster recovery plans had a “data center fire” section, but not an “everyone works from home” one. That will change.

Weeks 2-4: Remote Work Infrastructure¶

What worked immediately: Git, Jenkins, JIRA, Confluence — all cloud-based or accessible via VPN. What didn’t work: the phone system (on-premise), printers (hard to use remotely), signing processes (paper + stamp).

Microsoft Teams deployment in 5 days for the entire company. Not ideal, but it worked. Training on Teams via Teams — meta, but necessary.

Clients: “We Need It NOW”¶

Insurance company: online claims submission — from “planned for next year” to “needed in a month.” MVP in 3 weeks, React frontend, REST API, electronic signature. Not perfect, but functional. Clients sent damage photos from their phones instead of by mail. Satisfaction higher than with the paper process.

Bank: expanding online banking with features that were previously “branch-only.” Limit changes, loan applications, complaints. In production within two months. Normally, that would have taken a year of approvals.

What the Pandemic Accelerated¶

• Cloud adoption: arguments against the cloud collapsed when nobody could physically manage on-premise servers
• Digital signatures: from “nice to have” to “must have” overnight
• API-first: the mobile channel suddenly became a priority, REST API finally came first
• Automation: manual processes don’t work without people — automate what you can

Remote Development — What Works¶

Pair programming via screenshare is surprisingly OK. Code review via pull requests works better than in person (asynchronous, documented). Standups via video — shorter and more to the point. Sprint retrospectives with Miro — works.

What’s missing: spontaneous conversations over coffee, whiteboard sessions, onboarding new people. We don’t have a remote substitute for that.

Remote Work Security¶

The Zero Trust approach gained new meaning. VPN isn’t enough — you need: MFA everywhere, device compliance checks, conditional access policies, DLP for corporate data on personal devices. The investment in Intune and Azure AD conditional access paid off immediately.

No Return to “Normal”¶

The pandemic accomplished in 3 months what digital transformation would have taken 3 years. Not everything perfectly, but enough to make it clear: the future is hybrid. And the infrastructure must be ready for it.