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The remote workforce is the “new normal,” which is driving many IT leaders to reassess their current environments and align their technologies to the evolving needs of their organizations.
Use this interactive IT Explorer to investigate what our engineers have described as “make or break” IT priorities for the road ahead.
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Organizations are closing offices, extending work-from-home policies and developing hybrid operating models for their workforce. IT leaders face a variety of new technology challenges with these trends, and the time is now to prepare your organization for the new normal.
Click the icons on the right to explore what areas across your organization to prioritize first.
Teams are now largely remote, leaving onsite data centers and server rooms isolated at office locations. Not only do these physical hubs of infrastructure lack the onsite staff to effectively manage them, but organizations are continuing to pay the real estate expenses associated with housing the equipment. These hard costs, coupled with the enterprise agility and scalability benefits of moving to the cloud, a colocation facility or a hybrid model, make data center migration a viable option for organizations right now.
However, before leaping into the migration process, consider these common challenges and explore how to proactively overcome them.
A common misconception about the public cloud is that it’s expensive. In truth, migrating to AWS or Azure is expensive… if done the wrong way.
A common misstep organizations often make is by performing a “one-to-one” migration the cloud, meaning 100% of everything in their on-prem environment moves to the cloud. The issue is that legacy, on-prem environments are often outdated, underutilized and over-provisioned. Moving your on-prem infrastructure to the cloud doesn’t optimize this environment – it just relocates it, often resulting in you paying for cloud resources you don’t need.
For this reason, it’s important to reassess your on-prem environment before starting your migration to ensure you’re migrating only what you need. Once in the cloud, detailed, ongoing monitoring of your resource usage helps keep overspending in check.
Migration, particularly to the public cloud, is a huge investment of dollars and resources. Forrester has even discovered that labor makes up 50% of public cloud migration costs. Half your budget! According to analysts, this high cost often comes from the time it takes to refactor legacy, custom-built applications like ERP and CRM for the cloud.
Complicating matters is the fact that most IT teams lack dedicated in-house cloud expertise. As a result, migration best practices get overlooked and organizations end up overpaying for their cloud environment.
Most IT teams don’t have the luxury of having dedicated cloud specialists. As a result, opportunities to accelerate cloud migration, optimize spend and drive security and compliance often get lost in the shuffle of migration tasks.
If the cloud is in your organization’s future, asking the questions of who will develop your migration plan, who will drive security and compliance best practices and do they have the resources, bandwidth and expertise to manage your cloud environment post-migration should be a starting point.
If you’re like most other IT leaders, you were forced to scale a remote workforce and ensure there were no gaps in productivity or holes in your security posture. With teams now working remotely, IT leaders are re-assessing their environments and optimizing for a future where remote work is the new norm.
When it comes to enabling a remote workforce long term, here are the priorities IT leaders are addressing first.
As you’ve seen, moving your workforce remote completely changes your organization’s paradigm for collaboration. In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, most IT leaders were forced to implement and scale remote collaboration tools for messaging, web meetings and file sharing. Now the priority becomes managing and optimizing those solutions in an effort to drive productivity, mitigate security and compliance risk, monitor usage and optimize spend over the long term.
Real-time user support is even more critical now that your remote employees are scattered across geographies. If you’re like other IT leaders, you saw a frenzy of service desk calls and support tickets in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. Now the challenge becomes finding solutions for sustainable real-time user support at scale.
Out of necessity, many organizations rushed to implement new solutions and technologies for their remote workforces. While these deployments have been critical to business continuity and workforce productivity, IT leaders are discovering these solutions may have exposed their organizations to cybersecurity risks.
You can mitigate risk moving forward by taking action in the following areas.
Odds are you’ve already seen how complex the task of securing data access and file sharing becomes when workforces move remote. One of the most pervasive challenges facing other IT leaders is implementing role-based access controls, so 100% of users don’t have access to 100% of everything on the network. Diverting non-critical traffic off company virtual private networks (VPNs) is another priority, which has many IT leaders looking for solutions to monitor and secure activities like split tunneling.
Demand for solutions like VPNs and virtual desktop solutions is sky-rocketing in the face of these challenges. But, going forward, your priority should not just be implementing these solutions – it should be implementing and managing them at scale.
Cyberattacks will evolve in the new normal of enterprise IT, and that means your endpoint protection must also. That starts by implementing endpoint protection in the first place.
Unfortunately, there’s a prevalent misconception that basic anti-virus solutions deliver endpoint protection. They don’t. In fact, basic anti-virus solutions do nothing for pervasive threats like malware. This should be a major concern for your IT team if you manage high volumes of endpoints or you have a BYOD policy. A common misstep organizations often make is implementing a highly complex endpoint protection solution that they lack the time, resources or expertise to manage. It’s often best to perform a thorough assessment of your current posture to identify areas where there are gaps and vulnerabilities.
With workforces now consistently offsite and, in many cases, using their own devices to access the company network, overcoming visibility gaps will be an ongoing challenge for your IT team. Two of the biggest priorities for IT leaders are maintaining VPN performance and monitoring traffic. For this reason, solutions for VPN monitoring, multi-factor authentication and contextual identity management should be staples of your IT environment moving forward. Not only do these solutions help you head off VPN latency and capacity issues, but they enable your team with greater visibility and security over the remote network.
However, enhanced visibility brings a new challenge: Does your IT team have the bandwidth to divide their time between monitoring your remote network 24x7x365 and driving your strategic technology initiatives?
For many organizations, compliance with regulatory standards has gotten lost in the shuffle as the workforce has rapidly moved offsite. As an IT leader, the sooner you can reassess the compliance of your evolving IT infrastructure, the more future-proof your organization will be for navigating the risks and uncertainties of the road ahead. There should be no surprise that many organizations are mandating compliance assessments to their IT leadership.
Workforce limitations (capacity limits, travel restrictions, etc.) introduce new complexities to logistics. As a result, IT leaders are being pushed to find creative solutions for the following routine tasks.
Staging, configuring and testing mission-critical IT solutions gets a lot more difficult when offices are closed and staff is remote. This is the issue many IT teams ran into during the pandemic, and it’s likely to continue as remote workforces become increasingly the norm. For this reason, having space, power and resources to stage and configure multi-vendor IT solutions will be critical to technology rollouts going forward.
In the wake of the pandemic, many IT leaders have moved to proactively overcome supply chain interruptions by keeping inventory of mission-critical hardware at the ready in case of emergencies. Moving forward, it’s important to both prioritize building your IT inventory to overcome future, unexpected supply chain interruptions as well as where and how you will store that equipment.
With everything from managing export/import licenses and navigating through the customs process, shipping IT infrastructure globally is complex enough – today’s remote workforce trends add even more wrinkles to the process. Dedicated logistics personnel can ease this process, but most organizations don’t have the luxury of having these specialists. For this reason, many IT leaders are looking for opportunities to offload logistics management responsibilities to better align their organizations with the demands of the evolving global landscape.
