For Many, Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Can IT Deliver on User Expectations?

If 2020 has taught us one thing, it’s that trend forecasting is vulnerable to unpredictable forces of nature. However, we’d give good odds to the following: remote work of some sort will become a permanent change for a growing portion of the global workforce. And that adds up to new challenges for IT.

Remote Work Shifts IT’s Focus

When the rapid shift to remote work hit at the onset of pandemic lockdown, IT professionals had to quickly provide the infrastructure to support this change. Now, IT needs a longer-term strategy that supports end-user expectations—while dealing with increasing infrastructure complexity.

What’s the best way to provide access to applications and services to make work, collaboration, and connectivity successful from a remote setting? How much capacity is needed? How do you provide a seamless experience when those applications sprawl across multiple cloud environments and on-premises data centers? Indeed, investments in cloud services will only increase as companies look to gain the agility and flexibility needed to meet dynamically changing business requirements.

Planning for remote work has also driven increased commitment to remote access technology such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), along with security-related upgrades to ISP links, firewalls, and VPN concentrators. 

At the same time, lines of business within many organizations are working to improve online services, introduce mobile apps for customers, and drive critical revenue-generating opportunities. This, in turn, puts still more pressure on IT to ensure a quality end-user experience.

The growing complexity of digital infrastructure, applications, and services, coupled with a lack of visibility into those services and all their dependencies, is a shortcoming that puts IT behind the eight ball when it comes to ensuring optimal performance for remote workers. The bottom line is, IT needs a big picture view of performance and security to find and fix performance issues across the entire corporate infrastructure. Unfortunately, IT currently operates with a more kaleidoscopic view, as departments use a hodgepodge of application, cloud, and network visibility tools that create a fragmented view of how their infrastructure works.

The key to a successful strategy for increased remote work is end-through-end visibility. By holistically monitoring network, application, and end-user performance via visibility across private data centers, public cloud, and SaaS, IT professionals are better positioned to deliver a flawless end-user experience—regardless of where those end users are performing their jobs.

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