This insight from McKinsey Digital really got us thinking.

Knowing what we all know today, we find it fascinating that prior to Covid, CIOs estimated it would take an average of 454 days to transition to remote work.

And of course, the Covid-induced reality is that CIOs supported their organizations in going remote in merely 11 days. McKinsey rightly defines this as “Bold moves made fast.”

Interestingly, what the global tech community experienced is that while there definitely were some hiccups and hairy moments as infrastructure extended from relatively controlled environments to a dizzying patchwork of environment types — nothing truly destabilizing happened.

For example, at Microland, we transitioned our global workforce to remote in fewer than 10 days and then turned our attention to shifting over two million clients to working from home.

So we ponder: What informed the 454 day estimate and what can be learned from the fact that 11 days was about what it took to get the job done reasonably well?

From “nice to have” to “there’s no other option”

In retrospect, the 450+ day estimate feels outrageously cautious. Understandable given that it wasn’t energized by a global pandemic, but rather by corporate daydreaming about a "nice to offer" employee perk.

Further, when McKinsey surveyed the CIOs originally, enabling a remote workforce wasn’t likely viewed through the lens of productivity advantage and talent retention/attraction — as it is by many today. So, yeah, there was near zero urgency and more freedom to plan for time to make detailed lists and check them multiple times.

But then the world was turned upside down and CIOs and their teams everywhere responded with rapid-fire provisioning to fulfill a wide variety of user needs. This brought unprecedented changes to the workplace. But it also provided a remarkable petri-dish of gutsy experimentation. Out of necessity, corners were cut even as failure was very much not an option. And it’s kind of amazing that for the most part, everyone was pretty darn successful.

So can this extreme efficiency be carried forward in less fraught times? Should it?

We believe it can and should be.

Clearly, now that the proverbial “dust” is settling, security is of paramount concern. CIOs are assessing how best to secure the “anywhere” workplace and core business networks as the attack surface grows broader and more complex with each passing day.

This new framing of workplace modernization puts pressure on IT budgets which may quickly fragment if a strategy and governance aren’t enforced. And yet this very governance can stand in opposition to the seamless experience of flexibility, collaboration, and connectivity that workers now expect.

Urgent clarity about the road forward

We believe the infrastructure job at hand is to double down on the strategies and technologies that sustained security and reliability through the pandemic — now reimagined for today with simplified, flexible management.

• A cloud-centered workplace to enable agility and flexibility.


• A zero-trust approach to security combined with device and app virtualization to harden the network while allowing more collaboration amongst internal teams and partner companies.


• Workspace automation and orchestration as key capabilities of a management platform to support quick turnaround of device provisioning, application tools deployment, and lifecycle management.

Building on this foundation, companies now have several years of data collection to allow CIOs and their teams to embrace an analytics-informed, persona-driven approach to prognosticating where and how work happens and use this to both defend budget allocation and enforce governance.

Indelible lessons learned

At Microland our greatest lesson learned was both salient and existential. This lesson is that only urgency can drive mass adoption of change at lightning speed. The world was able to so quickly transition to a remote work model simply because urgency granted no time to think. Muscle memory of best practice kicked in. We at Microland – like others worldwide – acted on instinct. In fact, in a weird way we were called upon to function not that differently from the modern infra we design – in extremely real time we were sensing, learning, adapting, evolving.

A bit of news: the “public square” of code.

Microland is pivoting to a Platform-first approach to infra management allowing all types of companies to have greater flexibility and success.

And, it’s one way Microland technologists are creating a bit of a public square. This approach introduces extreme reliability while embracing SRE (site reliability engineering). Where’s the “public space” in that you ask? Well, all coders place their code in a single repository: Products are built and tested within this “common space” versus from any single person’s laptop. The extreme reliability comes from having a centralized, controlled mechanism for making changes and every change is tested — and more importantly — tested before rolled out for extreme reliability at scale.

Microland Monday is a newsletter brought to you by Microland and published the last Monday of each quarter.

Our goal is to inform and inspire the global community of CIOs, infrastructure managers, and solutions partners who are delivering on humanity’s digital aspirations.

Does this sound lofty? Perhaps. However, when one considers the global impact of intelligent infra that bestows productivity, agency and connection worldwide, it kind of does feel worthy of investigation and celebration.

So we’re having a go at exploring thought leadership and telling stories about the evolving possibilities of resilient infra and the community around it.

Microland Monday is published the last Monday of each quarter.

We hope it inspires you.