04-01-22 | Blog Post

How to Enable Your Remote Workforce

Blog Posts

The coronavirus forced many sectors to abandon physical working environments and adopt remote working to continue operations. While some companies had a seamless experience with this transition, others have not had the easiest time. Remote work policies allow employees to be flexible, but it also raises the questions of what boundaries need to be set and where.

It also begs the question – can employees work remotely all the time, or do they require to be within the same vicinity? A remote workforce not only helps preserve business continuity but also helps address the ever-changing regional requirements while protecting workers, especially those whose roles demand a constant physical presence.

But what happens if they don’t have the tools to enable them? Can they collaborate on the cloud? Do they have reliable backups? Are you sure their data is secured on their hardware with 2-factor authentication?

Four Vital Solutions To Enable Your Remote Workforce To Perform Their Best

Even before the pandemic, remote work had become a common phenomenon. A study by Global Workplace Analytics stated that remote work had more than doubled in ten years from 2005 to 2015. In 2015, remote employees accounted for 2.9% of the national workforce.

Telecommuting has been made possible with cloud availability and infrastructure. There has been a steady rise in cloud infrastructure in recent years, with many companies moving away from the non-cloud physical structure, and instead opting for cloud productivity.

Studies show that 94% of all businesses have adopted cloud services in different forms. Additionally, Remote Work Statistics show that about 34% of workers prefer working in the cloud and are prepared to look for another job if their current one requires them to return to the office.

So how do you ensure your workforce is empowered to perform their best? You can implement various tools to make a remote workforce productive. These services enable your remote workforce to focus on accessibility, collaboration within the cloud, reliability, and security.

Desktop as a Service

The bring your own device (BYOD) concept in the workplace isn’t new, and neither is the work from home (WFH) one. However, until COVID-19 happened, working from home was the exception. Many organizations have made it a rule, with nearly 80% of enterprises implementing and expanding universal work-from-home policies.

What’s more, 67% of these businesses expect the WFH policies to stay in place either long-term or permanently. The benefits that the flexibility of BYOD and WFH concepts have are many, but they carry their own challenges.

For instance, WFH takes away a company’s control of the logical and physical perimeter as employees are connected via their home or public WIFI networks. You also lose control over data and application security since they are distributed across different devices remotely.

Desktop as a Service is a cloud-based solution used to install virtual desktops to end-users. The infrastructure is hosted by a third-party cloud provider who handles the virtual desktop installation, management, and maintenance from their data center.

The provider can deploy virtual desktops to any location and on different types of end-user devices, not only helping you protect corporate assets from vulnerabilities but also ensuring availability and security with disaster recovery. Furthermore, it ensures sensitive data never leaves your enterprise’s logical perimeter and is compliant with regulations despite the distance.

Backup and DR

Backup and disaster recovery solutions are essential aspects in ensuring business continuity. Therefore, any decisions regarding these two components shouldn’t be made hastily and without a thought, as they are your company’s saving grace in the case of a disaster.

When picking the right backup and DR solution, ensure you choose a platform that aligns with your business needs. There is a crucial distinction between disaster recovery and backup. Backup refers to making extra copies of data to protect it in case of accidental deletion or database corruption. Disaster recovery is the planning and processing for establishing access to data and applications after an outage.

Selecting a cloud-based backup and DR offering informs you more of the costs of managing a significant infrastructure investment. What’s more, you gain the scalability necessary to ensure your data is safe even during a disaster. The best part about cloud backup and DR is that they support cloud-based and on-premise production environments.

Cloud Solutions

The abrupt remote work shift has undoubtedly pushed enterprises toward greater cloud adoption. Businesses benefit greatly from cloud solutions through seamless accessibility, flexible scalability both vertically and horizontally, optimized spending, enhanced security, and greater compliance.

Great cloud management helps enterprises automate manual processes by automating resources, improves cost-saving by allocating costs, optimizes expenditure with programmatic billing, and right sizes and enhances compliance and security measures. Native tools offer a valuable foundation for cloud practices, but cloud management offers depth and breadth that surpass any out-of-the-box functionality.

RTOs and RPOs

In the fast-paced world of today, downtime is an undesirable word. If your business experiences frequent downtime, it’s time to set goals for getting back online. are two of the most beneficial elements that play a massive role in the disaster recovery process.

RTO is a bespoke calculated number that details how quickly you should recover your systems from downtime. Do you know your business’ RTO? How quickly do you get your systems up and running after an incident? Defining your RTO helps you make informed decisions about your backup and DR strategies, and implement solutions that meet your objective.

On the other hand, RPO refers to the amount of data an enterprise can afford to lose and still function in case of downtime. You need to ask yourself questions like, when was the last time you backed up your data? If you lost everything today and relied on your previous backup, how much data would you still have to remain functional? Your RPO is the point in time you need to have your latest backup to recover your systems.

The Bottom Line

For some, accomplishing everything from home may not be as productive as coming to the office. It’s important to be honest with yourself and your staff, identify your weak points, and address them immediately. Remember, a remote workforce is only as effective as they are enabled. Without the proper tools, a remote workforce can fail.

By partnering with Otava, we will make sure your remote workforce is enabled now and as your business continues to evolve.

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