Brexit – Where Does IT Sit?

Over the past year or so, the debacle which is Brexit is looming. March 2019, in theory, is when D-Day arrives and all hell will break loose according to people who want to remain, or even according to those who want to leave the EU.

Amongst all this panicked noise and commotion, businesses are preparing for the unexpected. Will there be a deal? Won’t there be a deal? Will the UK actually leave? Right now we all have more chance of picking the right lottery numbers.

The question remains though, if or when we enter the new world of post-Brexit and the UK has exited the EU:

What do IT departments across the UK and the EU need to now have in place?

Undoubtedly there will be new regulations and laws about workers and their movements to and from the EU, about your data moving to and from the EU, and even security based on this as well.

This in some ways leaves IT in limbo. Today we have GDPR in place—or a specific UK version of it—but will that be enough? Will it have to be modified once again?

Outside of GDPR, business' HR departments will now have to deal with potentially a whole new raft of employment law changes. As a result, they will need to potentially modify existing tooling and workflows, or adopt new tools and workflows to help ease and automate people joining, moving within, or leaving the company.

Companies' virtual borders will also come into question:

How do we now control and track employee movement, ensuring they have the correct security profile assigned?

We are already seeing companies like Jaguar Land Rover who have bitten the bullet and implemented a post-Brexit type plan even before the event itself has happened! That in and of itself should signal to most people how much of an impact this will have on companies and their operations which extend outside of the UK.

Either way, IT will be in the eye of the storm when Cyclone Brexit finally lands. IT departments will need to be ready with the right tools to respond to change in business regulations and operations to make sure that they conform.

I'm sure there will be a grace period between if or when Brexit happens, and when new laws of engagement become enforced, a grace period would be the most sensible thing as it would allow businesses time to adjust or restructure if they have to.

This is the time IT needs to start doing their homework on what they have and does what they have give them the flexibility to be agile.

Vendors need to be offering tooling around service management, automation, and security (both endpoint and data) to at least be in the running to help those customers.

Those vendors, like Ivanti, that offer these types of tools in an integrated way, leveraging the power of automation and user context to help IT be agile to the business and the user needs post-brexit will undoubtedly be in the pole position when customers are looking to support life after Cyclone Brexit.