The COVID-19 crisis has been a test of management and leadership. Recent weeks have seen business leaders grappling with the dramatic upheaval to normal business operations and the corresponding changes to managing people and maintaining productivity. But as companies emerge from shelter-in-place, the question of “what does it take to lead a business through the recovery phase?” is on every leader’s mind.

For enterprises that have at least some part of their IT environment in the cloud, the key to protecting data starts with understanding the layers of the cloud stack and their corresponding security risks. Each layer has its own unique threat potential, and when IT teams understand how data transacts at each layer, they can take appropriate measures to safeguard against those threats. One of the most common is ransomware.

As companies invest in stronger firewalls and better IT infrastructure, brute force attacks have become harder to pull off. That’s the good news. The bad news is that hackers, in turn, have found new ways of wreaking havoc. The increasing use of ransomware as a weapon is a prime example of this. Through phishing or stolen passwords, a ransomware attack can sabotage a company’s most valuable asset, it’s content, without being detected.

When organizations around the world began shifting their workforces in response to the COVID-19 crisis, the question on everyone’s mind was “When will things go back to normal?” When social media giant Twitter announced it would be allowing employees to work remotely permanently, the conversation took a quick shift: Forget normal, are traditional offices gone for good?

The nature of work these days is collaborative. Teams that work together get more done. But successful collaboration in business goes beyond people; it applies to the tools teams use to get their work done. Never has this been more true than now with the global pandemic that has shut most offices down and led to widespread remote-work situations for employees.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, companies had to close offices and transition the bulk of their employees to full-time remote working. Here, we talk to IT leaders from IK Investment Partners and Brookfield Properties about their experiences of pivoting to a fully remote environment at speed – and how they empowered people to stay productive and connected.