Ahmed Sherif
Research expert covering IT services and gaming hardware
Hybrid work - statistics & facts
The past three years have sped up the digital transformation trend, compelling many businesses to rapidly develop a set of policies that enable their employees to safely work from locations other than the office. Following this abrupt shift to remote work, a new work model emerged – hybrid work.
Hybrid work models – the new social contract
One of the most critical challenges that companies faced when transitioning to this work model was defining what “hybrid” meant and finding the suitable and most efficient balance for remote work. In this regard, studies have shown that there is no answer to rule them all. Since every company, team, and employee is different, it all comes down to finding the hybrid work model that works best for them. However, whether or not a company opts for a remote work environment instead of a hybrid work set-up, one aspect remains undisputed - the investment in new infrastructure. A successful digital transformation persuades companies to increase their information technology (IT) spending, especially when it comes to enterprise software, and cloud infrastructure.Hybrid work environments are crucial for business continuity
The importance of technologies enabling hybrid work models was also emphasized by a strong sales growth of hardware devices such as PCs, notebooks, headphones and many others. Nevertheless, an efficient hybrid work environment needs proper collaboration tools to meet challenging and constantly changing demands. The collaboration software market revenue was valued at 19.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2022, and it is forecast to increase to nearly 21 billion U.S. dollars by 2025. The growth in revenue is a natural consequence of the increasing demand and usage of collaboration tools. For instance, the number of daily active users of Microsoft Teams increased from 75 million in the second quarter of 2020 to 270 million two years later.Technology companies set to profit from hybrid work
In the future, companies worldwide will continue to integrate technological innovations into their business operations and employee management to support emerging hybrid work models. For this reason, key cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are considered centerpieces to the accelerating digital transformation phenomenon, with Amazon Web Services leading the cloud infrastructure services market for over six years. Cybersecurity vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, or Fortinet were important cornerstones of business intelligence even before the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. However, their role became essential to a company's survival, especially since remote work setups left the door wide open for new security threats and vulnerabilities. As of 2022, endpoint security software and virtual private networks (VPNs) were the most used technologies by companies to secure work from home and hybrid work environments.
