Our working lives have seen an enormous transformation over the last six months. Many businesses are now reflecting on the lessons learned and how to use this new knowledge moving forward.
The overnight shift to remote work has been the catalyst for a monumental expansion in adoption of technologies like videoconferencing, collaboration, and cloud file storage. It’s becoming clear that these technologies will provide the foundation for the future of work.
Previously skeptical employers have witnessed first-hand that remote working can lead to productivity increases rather than the reverse. CIOs and IT professionals are now tasked with enabling a secure and connected remote workforce.
Intrado helps organizations develop a customized approach that protects legacy investments and creates a long-term, sustainable plan for remote working. Here are three essentials to consider as part of any long-term plan:
1. Connectivity
The first step to a secure remote working experience is securing the end-to-end connectivity. In the remote working scenario, any vulnerable component can render other secure components irrelevant. Historically, VPNs may have offered a solution, but many were designed for a fundamentally different time and are incapable of enabling an entire organization to use the connection for remote work, let alone the use of constant high-definition duplex video streams.
Organizations should review whether their VPN is really adding significant security for remote workers trying to connect into a solution hosted on the Microsoft Azure or AWS clouds, for example. The move to the cloud and as-a-service models means the VPN may just be adding a redundant connectivity hop.
To determine your network requirements, it’s vital to analyze end user connectivity and traffic patterns. Understanding your user profiles is critical to building out a viable connectivity strategy. An expert partner, like Intrado, can help you navigate the landscape of networking technologies to decide what is right for you, from SD-WAN to session border controller locations and carrier peering and routing.
2. End Users
Understanding your end users’ needs is critical in the planning process. The goal is to ensure they are equipped with the right devices, supported by the right network and user experience to work productively. And the solution you adopt will depend on the nature of your business and user needs.
3. Compliance & Commercial Factors
Employers have a duty of care to their workers, and it’s important to consider how to continue meeting these obligations if employees are no longer in the office. For example, employers must provide location-agnostic emergency services, so that help arrives at the correct location should a home-based worker dial an emergency number.
Remote working fundamentally changes so many things about the operations of a business that the impacts at a commercial level are as substantial as they are far-reaching. Intrado works with customers to maximize budgets, and more recently, to help them leverage many of the stimulus measures deployed around the world. There are many options available, from bringing forward equipment purchases to take advantage of attractive financing options to restructuring service contracts with legacy solution credits and flexible commercial terms.
While we are living in uncertain times, the future offers some exciting possibilities. At Intrado, we help our customers minimize risk and face the future with confidence, knowing that their remote working strategy leaves absolutely nothing to chance.
