Top 10 end-user computing stories of 2020

In 2020, IT departments have demonstrated how quickly they can adapt to provide essential end-user computing services to enable employees to work from home during the coronavirus lockdown.

The policy to deploy laptops for “road warriors” changed to laptops for everyone. Using corporate IT security as a reason not to enable staff to connect their own devices to the corporate network has been relaxed as the surge in demand for new corporate laptops led to supply shortages.

At a high level, people were able to work if they had access to the applications they used regularly. Some, such as office productivity tools, could be delivered as software as a service; others required end-users to dial into the corporate network.

This showed up the limits of virtual private networks (VPNs). Businesses that had only purchased enough VPN capacity and licences to cope with a relatively small number of remote workers in the workforce now needed to provide access for every worker. Rather than expand VPN capacity, there is now renewed interest in using software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs), which enable network managers to treat people’s homes as an extension of the branch office.

No review of 2020 is now complete without a look at the explosion in video conferencing. Zoom is now a household name, as companies have used such tools to keep in touch with staff. No one could have predicted the accelerated uptake of video conferencing and unified communications. These are not new technologies, but they demonstrated their value when people were unable to go into the office. 

From an end-user computing perspective, IT departments and tech-savvy employees were able to use the software and tools they had at their disposal to continue working despite the huge challenges posed by the coronavirus. Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 end-user computing stories of 2020.