A remote working solution needs to provide flexible, reliable and secure access to critical business applications and company networks for all employees, wherever they are.
It shouldn’t just replicate the old office environment. It should be able to keep the best parts of office working and remove the inefficiencies.
So what technologies should you have in place to support your employees?
Today’s enterprise networks are dealing with high volumes of traffic from several sources. They’re fielding hundreds of individual requests — all coming from different connections, devices and sometimes even continents.
This creates a new challenge for business networks, particularly when it comes to providing the capacity and bandwidth for tasks. This is where a Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) can help.
Using SD-WAN, traffic can be rerouted and sent over the fastest connections automatically. This enables tasks to be prioritised — such as those that require more bandwidth or transfer large amounts of data, i.e. video sharing and conferencing — so users don’t experience delays.
SD-WAN doesn’t just provide intelligent network management: it can also adapt and create more capacity for flurries of activity, helping to avoid any delays to the buying experience, disgruntled customers and a loss of sales.
This is crucial, for instance, when you consider an event like Black Friday for retailers.
As well as providing the capacity for high-bandwidth applications, it’s also worth considering how you manage and utilise your data.
The fact is that many businesses have more data at hand than ever before, but they’re still working out how to use it. According to our 2020 report on future ready businesses, 73% of businesses said effectively harnessing the data they collect is a major challenge.
SD-WAN provides a real-time view of the traffic and data moving across a network. This is particularly useful for monitoring how connections stand-up to being used by a remote workforce and whether additional capacity is needed.
Ultimately, provides intelligence to guide plans to enable uninterrupted access for employees to their corporate network or business applications. Businesses can monitor increases and decreases in traffic across their network, allowing them to understand how that impacts the performance of applications.
To keep employees productive, businesses are now investigating how employees can get the best out of the tools they have – and how they’re using those tools. Especially when it comes to their mobile devices.
Enterprise Managed Mobility (EMM) allows you to manage and maintain how employees use mobile devices for work.
Whether trying to figure out the right combination of devices you need in your business to build a connected, hybrid system or ensuring devices and networks are secure, EMM can provide complete visibility over your business devices.
For remote working, device management needs to be controlled, efficient, and centralised.
BYOD leaves too much risk for shadow IT, configuration issues and security problems, so you need to manage the selection and delivery of devices yourself.
Device lifecycle management (DLM) makes the process of getting devices to the right employees, at the right time a lot simpler.
Investing in DLM means devices can be staged, configured, kitted out and delivered straight to your employees’ doors. And be ready for use right out of the box.
It’s ideal for employees because they don’t have to worry about any technical setups or ongoing management, and it’s great for businesses because they don’t have to worry about devices being misconfigured.
Working models have completely shifted since the start of 2020, and many are never going back to the way they were.
This means rethinking and reprioritising what your business needs to be more agile, flexible and efficient in the future. Whether that’s expanding your device offering for employees or stepping up your digital transformation.
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