The pandemic hastened long-developing trends toward digitization and decentralization. As virus concerns, social distancing guidelines and convenience pushed people online, ecommerce sales surged, expected to hit $4.2 billion globally this year, jumping ahead by years in the process. To be sure, this isn’t a one-time trend. According to one survey , nearly half of shoppers who altered their shopping habits in 2020 plan to make those changes permanent.

Last year’s rapid and sometimes erratic transition to remote work left many businesses looking for new ways to understand employee behavior when working from home. According to a survey of 2,000 employers offering remote or hybrid work, 78 percent deployed employee monitoring software to track worker behavior in the past six months. As businesses emerge from the recent pandemic, it’s clear that some things will not return to business as usual.