March 2020. A Thursday evening like any other — until it wasn't. The government announces a lockdown. By Friday morning, you're trying to figure out how thirty employees are going to work from their living rooms using infrastructure that was never designed to leave the building.

For some businesses, the transition was seamless. They had cloud-based systems, remote access protocols, and IT partners who had already planned for disruption. For these organisations, the pandemic was an inconvenience, not a catastrophe.

For the rest — the overwhelming majority — it was a brutal wake-up call.

The Overnight Stress Test

COVID-19 did not break your IT infrastructure. It simply revealed what was already broken.

The pandemic was the most comprehensive, unscheduled IT audit in business history. And most organisations failed it spectacularly.

According to Eurostat, only 36% of EU businesses had any form of remote work capability before COVID hit. That means nearly two-thirds of European companies had no plan, no infrastructure, and no strategy for operating outside their physical offices. In Greece, where small and medium enterprises form the backbone of the economy, the figure was almost certainly worse.

Years of underinvestment were suddenly, painfully visible. The server under the desk in the back office. The accounting software that only ran on one specific Windows 7 machine. The email system hosted on hardware that hadn't been updated since 2016. The complete absence of any documented IT procedures.

None of this mattered when everyone was in the building. The moment they weren't, everything fell apart.

VPNs, Personal Laptops, and Prayers

The response, in most cases, was improvisation elevated to corporate strategy.

VPNs were hastily deployed — often misconfigured, frequently insecure, and almost never sized for the actual number of concurrent users. Personal laptops became corporate endpoints overnight, complete with their malware, outdated operating systems, and children's games installed next to sensitive financial data. Home WiFi networks — shared with streaming services and smart devices of dubious security — became the corporate network perimeter.

IT support, where it existed, meant a single overwhelmed individual trying to provide remote assistance to employees who had never been trained on basic digital hygiene, let alone secure remote work practices.

Gartner estimated that the average cost of IT downtime runs at $5,600 per minute. Multiply that by thousands of businesses, all experiencing various forms of downtime simultaneously, for weeks on end. The financial impact was staggering. But the true cost wasn't measured in downtime alone — it was measured in lost clients, broken processes, security breaches that went undetected, and competitive ground that would never be recovered.

Those Who Survived — and Those Who Improvised

A clear line emerged between two types of organisations.

The first group had treated IT as a strategic function. They had invested — not necessarily enormous amounts, but wisely. They had IT partners, not just IT support. They had migrated critical systems to the cloud. They had business continuity plans that, while perhaps not designed for a global pandemic, provided a framework for rapid adaptation. These businesses didn't just survive the transition — many of them thrived.

The second group had treated IT as an expense to be minimised. Their technology strategy amounted to: "Buy the cheapest option, and call someone when it breaks." When the pandemic hit, there was nothing to build on. No foundation. No architecture. No strategy. Just a collection of machines, cables, and good intentions.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: McKinsey found that 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail. But organisations that had at least begun the journey — that had established relationships with competent IT partners, started moving toward cloud infrastructure, documented their processes — were dramatically better positioned than those that hadn't started at all.

The "Temporary" Solutions of 2020 Are Still Running in 2026

Perhaps the most damning indictment of how businesses responded to the pandemic is this: a 2023 PwC survey found that 62% of organisations were still using "temporary" solutions deployed during the pandemic.

Solutions implemented in a panic — with no planning, no security review, no scalability assessment, and no documentation — are still running critical business operations. And now, in 2026, many of these same systems remain in place, six years after they were meant to last six weeks.

That TeamViewer installation you set up so the accountant could access the office computer from home? Still running. The shared Google Drive that replaced your file server? Still the primary document repository — with no access controls, no backup policy, and no audit trail. The WhatsApp group that became your de facto communication channel? Still where sensitive business discussions happen daily.

These aren't IT solutions. They're liabilities waiting to be exploited.

The Greek Reality: "The Guy Who Fixes Computers"

In Greece, the situation carries particular weight. The fabric of the Greek economy is woven from small and medium enterprises — businesses with ten, twenty, fifty employees. For many of these organisations, their entire IT strategy consisted of a relationship with "τον τεχνικό" — the guy who fixes computers.

This is not a criticism of those technicians. Many are skilled and dedicated. But there is an enormous gap between someone who can replace a hard drive or configure an email client, and a strategic IT partner who understands business continuity, regulatory compliance, data protection, and infrastructure architecture.

The pandemic made this gap impossible to ignore. Businesses that had a technician had someone who could set up a VPN. Businesses that had an IT partner had someone who could redesign their entire operational model in a week.

The difference between "we have computers" and "we have IT infrastructure" became the difference between businesses that adapted and businesses that merely survived — or didn't.

What This Means for You, Today

If you recognise your own organisation in these descriptions, you're not alone. And the point isn't to assign blame for decisions made under extraordinary pressure. The point is this: the conditions that created the crisis haven't disappeared. They've evolved.

Hybrid work is now permanent. Cyber threats have multiplied. Regulatory requirements — GDPR, NIS2, industry-specific mandates — continue to expand. Organisations that haven't addressed their foundational IT weaknesses aren't just carrying technical debt. They're carrying business risk that compounds with every passing quarter.

The pandemic didn't create new problems. It illuminated existing ones. If your IT "survived" 2020 through improvisation, nothing has fundamentally changed — you're still improvising.

Next in the series: Remote, Hybrid, Back-to-Office: Your IT Infrastructure Never Went Back to Normal

Not sure where your organisation stands? Let's start a conversation about building IT infrastructure that works — not just when conditions are perfect, but especially when they're not.