The global pandemic has transformed the way we work, and many of these changes are unlikely to go away anytime soon.

The post-COVID work environment will tend to be hybrid, where employees can go into the office and work from home in a seamless manner, according to Eron Kelly (pictured), general manager of product marketing at Amazon Web Services Inc. This new reality will require enterprises to keep the workforce highly connected.

“You’ve got to be able to access your software, your application from anywhere; it’s got to remain incredibly secure,” Kelly said. “[And] it’s got to be able to scale up and down. I think customers are increasingly looking at business models that are pay as you go, even for productivity solutions.”

Kelly spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how the work-from-home experience during the pandemic will change the way people work in the future, what companies have done and will continue to do to adapt to this new reality, and how AWS solutions support these new requirements. (* Disclosure below.)

Collaborative experiences tend to grow

While in the early days of the pandemic many businesses enabled remote work for cloud-based applications, now it is necessary even more, according to Kelly.

“It’s not just your cloud-based applications, which is what people think about initially. It’s all of your applications,” he said.

To make all applications available in a secure way, enterprises can use Amazon WorkSpaces, a managed desktop-as-a-service solution, to provision either Windows or Linux in a few minutes and quickly scale to provide desktops to workers worldwide.

“Customers are starting to say: ‘Hey, this is accelerating my bring-your-own-device strategy,’ because now you can bring whatever device you want,” Kelly stated. “I have a secure WorkSpace fully managed in the cloud. If you need more horsepower, you can get it with a different WorkSpace, but you don’t have to constantly look at updating your laptops as part of that engagement.”

A major trend in connectivity is the idea of ​​being able to have voice and video-enabled applications and have collaborative experiences in the context of that app, according to Kelly.

“We’re increasingly seeing customers, in particular [independent software vendors], using the SDK to video and voice enable their applications,” he said. “Slack was one big ISV earlier this year that announced their move to the Chime SDK as their primary video and voice platform. Salesforce followed up with a similar announcement for the Salesforce Anywhere product that comes out next year that’ll be based on it.”

Another use case for the Amazon Chime SDK is in the telehealth industry, where communication between patients and care providers can escalate to a voice and video call in the context of the application. The solution can also be used by gyms and personal trainers, for example.

“Being able to now have a streaming session with my clients through the same software that I use to manage my schedule and their time and keep track of their performance, that’s what I want,” Kelly explained. “We’re going to see increasingly video and voice-enabled applications across a broad spectrum, and it’s going to introduce new business models and new opportunities that we’re just scratching the surface on.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE