Survey Pinpoints Key UC&C Issues Affecting Remote Worker Productivity

According to Gallup’s annual Work and Education Poll, one in four U.S. workers now work entirely from home, with the number of remote-work telecommuting days doubling since last year. This dramatic increase places an added burden on IT departments to manage complex unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) solutions across an increasing distributed environment.

The vital link between UC&C performance and worker productivity was highlighted in a recent survey of 300 IT decision makers from companies with $1 billion or more in annual revenue. The survey, commissioned by NETSCOUT, had a number of key findings:

• 97% of respondents said that collaboration platforms, applications, and tools have become much more critical in the current work environment.
• 85% said that the increased use of UC&C platforms had driven them to upgrade their solutions to provide a better workforce experience.
• UC&C platforms have become much more critical to business, and 85% also said usage has either increased or significantly increased.
• More than 73% cited challenges resulting from increased usage. Cybersecurity, privacy concerns, response time, network visibility, bandwidth issues, and ensuring users have the proper equipment were the top issues.
• Problematic UC&C platforms place an incremental burden on IT departments, with respondents citing an increase in calls to IT (63%), open tickets (59%), and user frustration (55%) as the top issues associated with UC&C platforms.
• When asked how many collaboration platforms and tools they supported, 29% reported that they supported 3-4, 34% said 5-9, 12% supported 10-15, and 10% were responsible for 16 or more.

““With so many people working from home, there is now an increased reliance on real-time services like UC&C,” said Paul Barrett, chief technology officer, enterprise, at NETSCOUT. “However, with the dramatic uptick in traffic volume—resulting in dropped packets and latency issues—IT departments need to understand the root cause of these issues, such as a saturated VPN concentrator or a problem that resides with a software-as-a-service provider.”

Read the IDC Technology Spotlight: UC&C and Network Analytics: A Critical Coupling