The tech intensity generated by the blistering speed of digital transformation has continued to intensify over the past year. While this has resulted in exciting new opportunities for our partner network, it has also challenged organizations across the planet as they work to keep up. Our customers are turning to partners to help them navigate these changes and ultimately evolve their organizations. 

Amidst this perpetual change, resilience has emerged as a key factor for long-term success. An organization’s ability to survive and adapt to change often dictates whether it becomes a leader or laggard in its given industry or solution area. As we assist our customers with their digital transformation journeys, it’s critical that we help each of them to build digital resilience across their business. 

As Microsoft CVP Gavriella Schuster shared at the beginning of the year, we’ve identified four key priority areas for partners this year—remote work, business continuity, security, and cloud migration. I’ve rounded up a handful of resilience-focused resources to help you and your customers grow their resilience across these priority areas: 

Remote work 

• Microsoft EVP Judson Althoff shared a blog post exploring how several customers are evolving their organizations in response to the widespread shift to remote work that occurred in early 2020. These customer examples feature how cloud-focused business strategies are driving digital transformation for Shell, Land O’Lakes, BNY Mellon, Unilever, and NHS Digital. 

• Our Remote Work Practice Development Playbook also provides useful insights to help you guide your customers through the transition to remote work. 

• Microsoft partner Konsolute launched a new onboarding solution for remote employees. Its customization capabilities allow companies to ensure their new employees have clarity in their roles and stay connected and engaged. You can learn more about their approach and see if it sparks any ideas for your own organization. 

Business continuity 

• Microsoft Azure provides built-in high-availability and disaster recovery options to ensure maximum resilience for all workloads. We continue to invest in infrastructure, and earlier this month updates were announced that strengthen business continuity with new reliability and security enhancements. 

• Streamlining your operations can help your customers capitalize on efficiencies that increase their resilience. For example, Microsoft partner Neal Analytics unified data on a single platform that aggregates customer data for their customer TTEC. The results included an improved customer experience and increased sales.  

• Late last year, we announced updates to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, including add-ins that allow organizations to run critical warehousing and manufacturing workloads on Azure stack devices. This in turn improves resilience and ensures operational continuity—even if you become temporarily disconnected from the cloud. 

Security 

• Operational resilience is “the ability to sustain business operations during any major event, including a cyberattack,” according to Microsoft CVP Ann Johnson. In a previous post, she outlines how adopting a Zero Trust security framework can help you and your customers build operational resilience.  

• A two-part series dives into how clearly understanding cybersecurity can help your organization become more resilient. In the first installment, it looks at how being resilient to cybersecurity threats is about “understanding and managing the organizational impact from the evolution of human conflict that has existed since the dawn of humanity.” In the second post, it goes deeper into how everyone within an organization can work together holistically toward common goals, like keeping data secure.  

Cloud migration 

• To better meet the specific needs of organizations, earlier this year we announced three new industry cloud offerings: Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit. We also announced the first updates to the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and a public preview date for Microsoft Cloud for Retail. These new offerings are the future of cloud, and they offer organizations a tailored experience that helps them do business more dynamically while boosting resilience. 

• Migrating to Azure can help your organization boost its resilience. Services like Azure Backup Center, Azure Resource Mover, and Azure Confidential Computing can help you increase your workload availability and deploy backups at scale while protecting against threats. 

• Early last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined “three r’s” as a phased response to the ongoing pandemic, which include response, recovery and reimagining. A post shared earlier this month explores how Azure has enabled our customers to not only navigate the recovery phase more smoothly, but it’s also empowered them to more effectively lean into the reimagining phase to adapt to new opportunities. 

Our partner network has an unprecedented opportunity to help our customers build the capacity to weather whatever change the future may hold. As we do so, we’ll become even more trusted and establish relationships that can provide a lifetime of value. I want to thank you for your ongoing partnership, and I’m confident that as we work together to meet the needs of our collective customers, we’ll unlock sustainable growth for both our individual organizations and the entire network.