12 01732 759725 PREDICTIONS Recruitment Agile, customised support the key to buoyant, resilient companies By Iain Laws, CEO of Towergate Health & Protection The scramble to recruit and retain talent will drive the need for better benefits. There is a limit to the salary increases that can be offered but clever use of health and wellbeing support can help to ensure a strong offering to existing and new employees whose expectations of employer support will continue to increase. Benefits will become more tailored and more advice-led, de-risking the business by providing preventative care, which can reduce sickness absence. Understanding workforce demographics will become more important in selecting and offering benefits and the best wellbeing support. For example, Generation X (born 1965-1980) are typically more concerned with swift access to treatment, while Millennials, also known as generation Y (born 19811996), are more interested in help with nutrition and fitness. Risk profiling across employee groups’ health and wellbeing will become more important and is key to being able to offer appropriately tailored support. Just as health and safety risks can be assessed and mitigated, so can health and wellbeing risks. Risk profiling the workforce will allow a more tactical approach and a companyaligned strategy. The NHS is struggling and employers may need to plug the gap if they want employees to stay healthy and at work. There will be budget constraints for employers, so all will be looking to get more bang for their buck, with creative use of private medical insurance, cash plans, employee assistance programmes and a mix of offerings to employees. Towergate Health & Protection combines an independent insurance broking service for businesses and individuals with specialist health and wellbeing advice and solutions. Working with insurance providers, it develops cloud market was valued at $85 billion in 2021 and Statista expects it to reach a value of $262 billion in 2027. Organisations choosing a hybrid cloud architecture combine the best of the public or private clouds and on-premises data centres. They can benefit from greater cost-control, faster application deployment and the ability to manage all their workloads centrally while extending advanced orchestration capabilities all the way to the edge. Hybrid architectures can be notoriously complex and costly to operate, but the advent of nextgeneration cloud management platforms allows organisations to manage all their environments from a single interface and gain a full understanding of performance. Instead of watching costs rack up with no gain in performance, more organisations will switch between environments according to their requirements, not the cloud provider’s. Enterprises can also implement role-based access controls and encryption, significantly reducing risk and improving visibility for IT compliance teams. More organisations will realise they can strike the balance between cost, performance, efficiency, flexibility and security in hybrid environments. Pulsant is a digital edge infrastructure company providing cloud, colocation and connectivity services to UK businesses, regional enterprises and service providers. Its network of 12 strategically located edge data centres, interconnected through a low latency network fabric, brings 95% of the UK population within reach of businesses seeking to deploy new edge applications or securely extend hybrid infrastructure to improve performance. https://www.pulsant.com/ exclusive products to satisfy clients’ particular insurance needs, while also providing occupational health and employee assistance programmes and health screening. towergatehealthandprotection. co.uk The Circular Economy ESG boost for refurbished IT By Nick Stapleton, Managing Director of ETB Technologies In 2023, businesses looking to make new IT purchases will continue to be impacted by the same supply chain challenges we saw last year as a result of the war in Ukraine, Brexit and the ongoing semiconductor crisis. We don’t expect this to ease for at least 6-12 months at a minimum. The upshot has been a boost to the circular economy – particularly the refurbished IT sector – as organisations with digital transformation programmes have looked to new sources to improve or upgrade their IT infrastructure. We have seen this ourselves, with a 44% increase in new customer spending from 2021-22. We expect this trend to continue as more businesses understand how they can benefit from refurbished enterprise IT. Parallel to this, we expect to see continued focus on quality and standards, both for the hardware supplied and service and experiences. Another factor that will lift the refurbished IT market is the increased profile of ESG programmes. While societal impact has always been an area of focus for businesses, the reskinning of ESG to become a governancerelated topic correlates with environmental awareness becoming a board-level issue. More financing is coming into the industry from green investors and there will continue to be consolidation as distributors buy up firms focused on areas like recycling. Founded in 2001, ETB Technologies is a leading supplier of refurbished servers, storage and network equipment. www.etb-tech.com ...continued Iain Laws Towergte Health & Protection Nick Stapleton ETB Technologies In 2023, businesses looking to make new IT purchases will continue to be impacted by the same supply chain challenges we saw last year as a result of the war in Ukraine, Brexit and the ongoing semiconductor crisis
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