What’s next for IT built for Covid tracing?

Han Chon

WHILE there may be ongoing conversations about how organisations can best adjust to a post-Covid environment, there’s one question no one seems to be asking: What are they going to do with all the infrastructure that was deployed to support contact tracing and other unexpected requisites that emerged during the pandemic? 

Across the globe, thousands of companies made significant investments during the pandemic to launch and support tools that would enable them to adhere to their respective government’s contact tracing requirements and support remote working en masse. With many employees expected to continue to work remotely, the wide-scale virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that was implemented during Covid-19 continues to make sense in a post-pandemic workplace. However, the contact tracing tools – from mobile applications; tracking software; backend systems that review, manage, and even predict movements and behaviour; to sophisticated analytics engines that interpret all the data collected – may now seem redundant in a post-Covid world. But with a little bit of tweaking and some out-of-the-box thinking, organisations should be able to repurpose most, if not all, of these tools.