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It is clear from numerous research studies about the modern workplace, and conversations we are having every day with our customers that we are entering a new, and permanent, era of hybrid working. We believe this represents an opportunity for organisations to fundamentally rethink what work is, how they provide products and services to their customers and engage and empower their employees.
In this blog post we want to help answer some critical questions we hear from working with our customers as they adapt to a set of rapidly changing needs.
After the initial rush of getting everyone working remotely at the start of the pandemic, CIOs are switching their focus to tackle the longer-term challenge of permanent hybrid working environments, after all this is where we live now.
There is a critical difference between an approach of enabling remote working within an organisation to thinking about what an employee focussed hybrid workplace looks at.
Many organisations have stopped after the initial push to enabling remote work and are now focussed on bringing employees back into the office. The challenge is that this isn’t appealing to a significant proportion of the workforce and with Australia at almost full employment (4% unemployment at time of writing) we are seeing stiff competition for talent and employees are looking for organisations offering more flexible working conditions and leading-edge technology that supports being fully productive wherever they are based.
One of the core foundations is the delivery of new devices to employees that are configured with auto-provisioning so they can be productive from first turning on a device. We are helping our customers provide a “white glove” service for new starters as part of a thorough onboarding process to deliver a great employee experience without needing to come to the office.
The provision of accessories is also a key consideration. The right tools are critical to employees providing great customer experience and external monitors, keyboards, ergonomic seating, stand up desks and noise cancelling headphones combine to help create the right hybrid work environment.
We help customers look at the right mix of technologies including virtual desktop environments, which is especially useful for on (and off) boarding contractors. We often utilise solutions like VMware Workspace ONE that integrates access control, application management and multi-platform endpoint management. This approach enables organisations to provide an experience that is easy for employees to understand and use and can be delivered from the cloud.
We recently worked with one of our clients, CXC, to streamline their infra-structure and improve collaboration across their offices, which span 50 countries. We assisted them to deploy a fully managed hardware solution which enables full configuration for new devices and staff members anywhere in the world. The new system allows staff members anywhere in the world to purchase a new device and, when they first log on, that device will be fully configured with the client’s standard operating environment and applications. This happens without any hands-on attention required by either their internal IT team or Tecala.
Hybrid working has also created a unique challenge in how teams work together. Communication and collaboration parameters are being redefined to address the growing need to engage with colleagues, contractors, and customers across different physical and virtual spaces and time zones.
We have worked with many of our customers to deploy new communication and collaboration platforms that support these very diverse teams. Organisations need to be able to spin up project-based initiatives quickly with co-ordinated communication, messaging, and document sharing and collaboration.
The drive toward more effective teamwork will extend the ongoing emphasis on cloud migration. Employees have moved, and are no longer in the office, and in many cases, this means it makes sense for the workloads (the data and applications that employees need) to also move. If the people aren’t in the office, why are the systems and data?
We have helped many of our clients move their workloads to our private cloud facilities and public cloud – and hybrid environments, depending on business need – allowing easy and secure access for all employees. In some cases this also can mean migrating legacy applications that don’t work well in the cloud to a modern SaaS alternative.
Today, we are working with an increasing number of our customers in the automation of manual processes. Using automation and workflow to simplify common business processes helps to make everyone more productive and employees to be able to work effectively remotely.
Security is a key priority for hybrid working and, today, organisations need to think about security in a cloud-device-data approach. It’s no longer optimal to rely on the office-firewall-internet approach.
Zero trust is a core tenet of a hybrid work environment. This includes rethinking network security and eliminating VPN connectivity as a start point. At Tecala we recommend a zero-trust approach for all our clients – more granular security and 2-factor authentication are the building blocks of any hybrid working strategy and are essential in the security landscape we now live in. A single point of access into a company’s network and systems provides too much attack surface for hackers and unfortunately, it’s one of the areas they target.
We also recommend strong cloud-native endpoint protection that is more effective than static AV solutions of the past and is more adaptive in recognising threat patterns beyond outdates signature recognition. Security also needs to become more proactive than reactive, and this requires an increased focus on security information and event management (SIEM) and this is something we often provide as-a-service for our customers.
At Tecala we continue to thrive on the challenges brought to us by our clients on how they can rethink the definition of work for the 21st century and provide a truly modern workplace that meets the expectations of a modern workforce.
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The prospect of having to deal with a breach is an increasingly likely scenario for many organisations yet many organisations remain focused on prevention.
In this blog post we will cover some of the key trends that are impacting how networks are evolving, and how organisations can take advantage of these shifts to deliver more robust, more secure, and more flexible services to their customers and employees.
