Pandemic increased the adoption of cloud   

N K Mehta, MD & CEO, Secure Network Solutions India

The key trends 
Physical office is no longer the necessity. Virtual offices, meetings, teams and collaboration are acceptable. Focus has turned towards achieving productivity than putting everybody in a room to work. Are the right people, doing right things (effectiveness), and doing things right (efficiency) are the questions. Access to corporate resources, maintaining confidentiality, and integrity, liberating them from a physical work place, and yet achieve the highest productivity is the key trend to watch. Remote productivity products are sure to see an uptrend. 

While some companies have reported increase in productivity, many are facing productivity challenges. As a result many large corporate are trying to bring the workforce back to office, even for few days a week. So Hybrid trend is what is going to follow in future. 
Remote working has shifted focus from perimeter security to end point security and hence EDR products would be a key focus. Automation of threat management would also be another trend to watch.

Cloud to scale the customers’ business 
Public Cloud offerings are yet to become practical and economical. Prices have to come down to increase the reach. Financially stable and profitable companies have adopted cloud for Mail, CRM, ERP, and HRMS. Hybrid environment widely exists. Converting them into 100% cloud will take some time. India based companies whose target customers are in India, can move their infrastructure to India based service providers offering collocation services as the first step towards building (private) cloud. In a lighter note, due to pandemic, romancing with cloud has increased in a big way however marriages are not happening at same pace and romancing would still continue for some time.  

The latest technology adoption trends in MSMEs
From the business applications point of view, mail, CRM, ERP, and HRMS are the new adoption trends. Collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex are in vogue. From the Cyber Security point of view, SSO/MFA, Cloud based DLP, SASE/SSE, EDR, and Cloud Firewalls are in trends. MSMEs offering Web based services are utilizing Cloud based DDoS, WAF, and CDN facilities.