Working From Home

The legacy of the pandemic has led to the development of a hybrid working model, where employees expect to be fully flexible in their approach to location and access to technology, inspiring new ways of collaborating, innovating, and achieving business goals. Whilst this enables the workforce to be flexible on their location and working environment, it presents unfamiliar problems for IT Departments. 

As businesses move towards distributed methods of working, the technology you choose plays a vital role in supporting teams and business goals. The hybrid working model is forcing organisations to change their approach to IT procurement and management and savvy companies are prioritising their technology investments to empower remote working on a large scale.  

Increasingly, organisations need to provide the right tools to enable employees to work from a remote office, home, or elsewhere, on any device. This new way of working requires companies to be prepared to respond quickly and effectively to changing business needs. 

IT teams are actively searching for technologies and strategies that will help them balance cost and risk plus improve employee engagement and productivity to provide a secure, scalable, and unified digital infrastructure. 

The challenges faced by IT teams with distributed working models 

A 2021 VMware report uncovered that more than 90% of employees rely on their employers to provide the technology and tools needed to be successful at their jobs when working remotely. 

Not only does a business’s IT system have to accommodate and account for remote access to company data and software, but technology also has to provide a highly productive and collaborative environment, virtually, for an organisation to work. This is highlighted by the fact that 73% of companies say that an integrated workforce solution is a critical priority solution for hybrid working.  

IT teams must consider a number of factors to establish and maintain a viable hybrid working model that is fully supported by their IT infrastructure.  

Creating seamless employee experiences 

To enable rapid remote working during the pandemic, IT teams had to ensure employees could access the right applications and data to do their jobs. However, in many cases, these processes used disconnected, on-premise management tools unsuitable for the remote workforce. 

To ensure a productive hybrid workforce, now that distributed working methods are the norm, IT teams need to ensure their employees can enjoy equally positive experiences regardless of the device they are using and where they are based.  

This can be achieved through an investment into connectivity and hybrid architecture which ensures high-quality, continuous experiences and allows the workforce to work from anywhere seamlessly. 

Increased security concerns 

However, with employees capable of accessing secure data and software from anywhere, hybrid working can increase risks for your IT system. IT teams must manage a bigger potential attack surface, as users, endpoints and applications are spread across existing networks due to the expanded IT surface area created by remote working. 

IT teams must build intrinsic security measures into everything – the application, network and anything that carries data, to mitigate the risk of cyberattacks and data breaches.  

This can be difficult to establish and manage but developing robust processes for evaluating systems and solutions will enable organisations to reduce security risks and ensure IT teams can respond quickly to any problems that arise. 

Simplifying operational complexity 

Security is not the only concern; the speed at which organisations had to adapt to remote working meant they hastily invested in tools and applications to assist collaboration and productivity. Whilst these offered quick fixes to enable employees to do their job, many companies found themselves with a wide mix of different tools and siloed teams. 

Moving forward, IT teams need to implement efficient solutions that provide secure, reliable, and consistent access to applications and services, wherever employees are working from.  

Scalable solutions and automation tools should be considered to simplify operations and support the anywhere workforce. 

Facing these obstacles seems daunting, particularly on a large scale in which your business security and productivity can be placed on the line. However, there are solutions to help make hybrid working a safe, productive, and viable option for business structures and development.  

Multi-Cloud Edged Architecture 

The rise in hybrid work models is driving the need to evolve to a multi-cloud edge architecture that allows for distributed users, devices, workloads, and data.  

These applications and services may run at the edge of the network, be in the public cloud, consumed as SaaS, or reside in a private cloud environment.  

Regardless of where they reside, organisations need to optimise network connectivity, assure application performance, and protect users and applications from internal and external security threats. 

Preparing Your Business for Hybrid Working 

Techbuyer Enterprise Solutions offers bespoke IT systems and solutions to adapt your business to any situation or climate, including home or hybrid working.  

Our technical experts have decades of experience, and they are on hand to offer solutions to implement a bespoke, performance driven IT solution uniquely designed by our team around your company’s needs, budgets, and priorities. Enterprise Solutions design IT architecture systems focused on security and data protection, delivering a high-class digital experience, maximising efficiency and IT operations and accelerating edge transformation to multi-cloud edged architecture.  

Contact our team to let us know what you need from your IT system below.