Reset and Thrive Your Business (03) - Getting Your Remote Workplace Strategy Implemented

This blog is the third piece in our Reset & Thrive blog and webinar series, all of which can be viewed here:

1. Reset & Thrive – What’s Next?
2. Reset & Thrive – Planning Your Digital Transformation
3. Reset & Thrive - Getting Your Remote Workplace Strategy Implemented
4. Reset & Thrive - Maintaining the Remote Workplace Environment You Created
5. Reset & Thrive – How to Reduce Security Risks in the Future
6. Reset & Thrive - Why Future Remote Workforces Need Advanced Data Backup
7. Reset & Thrive - How HR can Facilitate Agile Work
8. Webinar Recap: The Remote Working Reset

As companies commit to building long-term strategies to make telecommuting permanent, IT teams need to address the logistics of running and maintaining a remote workplace.

The current shift towards remote work has created fresh new paradigms for how organizations operate. Companies have completed their “trial run” of remote work over the last few months and workers have found that it suits them just fine: 73% of them now believe that their employers should provide them with work-from-home (WFH) options. As a result, in the “new normal”, the workplace has come to signify an ecosystem of many locations rather than a single hub.

Managers and leaders are happy, too: lockdown conditions have shown that telecommuting works. Effective team collaboration is possible in a remote setting – so long as everyone is using the right remote collaborative technology. This seems intuitive, but there is solid evidence it’s the way of the future, as published in a Cushman & Wakefield report assembled from millions of data points from more than 50,000 respondents.

So, if the key to effective remote working is technology-based, IT teams play a vital role in helping their organizations adjust to the new normal. Here are three areas where they should be concentrating their efforts to get things up and running to bring the new remote workplace strategy to life.

Thinking carefully about remote workplace logistics can help IT teams avoid the pitfalls of moving to the cloud too quickly. Digital Transformation at your organization may have started long before the shift to remote work, but now is the time to strategize your next move on the cloud continuum.

If you already started moving key workloads to Azure and AWS, this can now resume – but with greater focus on enabling a permanent remote workforce. That may mean reconsidering which workloads take priority, or it may even mean a different cloud model, considering the changed workplace of the new normal.

Security should be a priority. In the rush to deploy remote work, security may have taken a back seat but that has to change. No more “just getting by” without inherent security checks. You must make sure you are allocating enough VPN resources to help your employees work securely and efficiently. With a 165% leap in business VPN usage over the last few months, these issues need to be addressed swiftly and directly.

Remote teams have enjoyed increased efficiency because of great collaborative tools and platforms. And now is the time for IT to become more efficient, too. One area is security, which can benefit from tools that allow them to push software and security policy updates to all the devices on the network.

Likewise, IT efficiency can benefit from centralization in other ways as well. One essential area for improvement is data backup & recovery. Streamlining and centralizing these functions with a single, scalable platform saves IT teams time and money while also increasing resilience – a quality that is pivotal as we enter the new normal. After all, resilience is of the utmost importance, as any downtime in your company network will impede the whole team’s ability to successfully work remotely.

At the start of the year, IT teams had to accomplish hair-on-fire tasks and now they face “build back better” pressures as they create the conditions that will enable the new normal. Plus, IT departments are still expected to adhere to cost optimization and reduction while driving innovation and increasing value – tall orders! To reduce costs, they can begin by looking at software license management (SLM), which also reduces risk. SoftwareONE’s SLM Cost Take-Out helps simplify the process and brings lasting results while increasing productivity in IT as they face a growing remote workplace landscape.

Other areas of productivity for IT can be leveraged through increased visibility and better compliance. SAMSimple helps IT departments optimize their software environment, getting them closer to “audit ready” status even as the digital landscape becomes bigger and more complex because of remote work. Productivity platforms are the name of the game right now for IT. They offer automation, visibility, and accountability and they help identify cost-saving opportunities.

PyraCloud, for example, gives IT the tools they need to increase productivity in other areas, such as monitoring digital supply chains, managing contracts, and tracking cloud spend in a multi-cloud environment. Keeping an eye on these essential remote workplace functions is one way to signal to employees and other stakeholders that the business is resilient and will not go down should there be another emergency like the pandemic.

The WFH movement has changed the outlook for American businesses as they discover its benefits and learn to optimize their remote work environments for efficiency, productivity, and cost. Workers are supportive of the new landscape for work because it enables a greater work-life balance, among countless other lifestyle and professional benefits. Teams benefit because they have access to a greater talent pool.

Leaders are quick to adjust to the new normal too, as they recognize the potential for lower costs and more flexibility. Many are shifting their perspectives and redirecting funds to support the new work paradigm for their U.S.-based workforce. In fact, among the Fortune 500 list of CEO’s, almost three-quarters say that the best investment opportunity is right here in the United States – not China, Europe, India, or anywhere else in Asia.

The key to all these positive changes and digital transformation is the IT team. Just as they worked feverishly to implement WFH technology during the early days of lockdown, they are now working diligently and tirelessly to build the new ecosystem of the future: the “new normal” that will invariably encompass many different forms of remote work, whether it is work from home, branch locations, or remote teams. They are making organizations and employees ready for whatever challenges they will face today and in the future so everyone can embrace the advantages of remote working.