Are You Ready for The Remote Workforce?
Amid the on-going COVID – 19 crises, ensuring business-critical processes and underlying systems operate at desired levels has become a top priority for CIOs and IT leaders across almost every industry. While some might argue that the impact of the pandemic on service is mild compared to the adverse effect on a manufacturing setup, the need to build system resilience is not biased. Leadership and HR teams have realised the need to maintain transparency and open communication channels with their employees given the topmost priority remains the safety and security of the workforce; but as leaders address their staff on personal safety and job security issues, the challenge to maintain workforce productivity has burdened most IT and Operations teams like never before. While system resiliency for business continuity has been a key component of IT strategies and road maps, such strategies- e.g. Disaster recovery, really don’t address the impact of the pandemic situation. Additionally, the need for cyber security at this time has only increased. Given the shift to homeworking, it is imperative that IT and Security teams work together to build Zero Trust protection controls to ensure systems- infrastructure, applications, network, cloud, data and identities are secure.
To help large enterprises and small and medium businesses during this crisis, Lauren put together this paper on some of the IT and security best practices for remote working solutions that can help IT teams to ensure secure connectivity and access to business-critical systems at such a time while optimizing costs.
In this paper we have defined some of the challenges the enterprises are facing today around the enabling the digital remote workforce and our approach and recommendations around implementing Video Collaboration, Virtual Desktop Solutions, Data Leak Prevention (DLP), Multi Factor Authentication and other such cloud and security considerations.
Overview
Introduction
A crisis like COVID-19 impacts how, when, and where we work. Unlike other regional and short term ‘DR scenarios’ like a natural calamity or even a Data Centre building on fire, such a pandemic has long term and global implications. This has been an unfortunate wake up call for business leadersand CIOs all over the world. The ability of IT teams to provide secure remote working services toemployees has taken centre stage. We must admit, we didn’t plan for this. However, the availability of the cloud to practically anyone with an internet connection, opens a window of opportunity for CIO’s and their teams to come out on top.
In August 2019, The Harvard Business Review presented a new form of remote working: working from anywhere (WFA) with global enterprises like SAP and Akamai even rolling out WFA programsfor their employees.
HBR also presented a study that pointed out that the average worker was willing to accept an 8% less pay for the option to work from home (WFH). These figures suggest that staff productivity can increase when WFA and WFH options are extended by HR teams and any increase in productivity surely points to increase in revenue.
The decision to retain critical applications in on premise data centres rather than migrate to the cloud for reasons or perceived benefits like fixed and predictable costs, additional control over performance requirements and security, lower latency are coming into question now as offices are empty and all employees are working from home.
We don’t know when this is going to end and the extent of the socio-economic impact that this pandemic will have, but when it does end, it would have given us a new perspective on remote working, which will become the new norm. It will be the companies that use this time to leverage cloud technology, redefine their security postures and educate their employees accordingly that will come out on top.
Business Challenges
Given the unprecedented impact of COVID- 19, CIOs have had to take up the challenge of enabling the remote workforce like never before. CIOs and IT leaders now face the challenge of maintaining business-critical applications while also on boarding staff to enterprise private networks from their respective homes. We are seeing infrastructure breakdowns, denial-of-service attacks, and downtime on critical applications at their very peak because of traffic loads that were never accounted for. Below are some of the challenges that CIOs and IT operations teams are facing:
Addressing these challenges
The challenges listed above have become a real burden to CIOs and IT teams who should be focusing on optimizing operating systems and improving customer-facing applications. While the challenges may seem too many, we believe that by adopting a few best practices organizations can streamline this process and ensure business continuity.
Business Value
Businesses that are still on-premise are seeing the ease with which early cloud adopters leverage cloud services like Virtual Desktop solutions, Video collaboration solutions, API based security and other such cloud services. The unprecedented turn of events caused by COVID-19 has got CEOs and leadership teams to now re-prioritise their IT initiatives to a larger extent after the lockdown is lifted. Many CEO’s have now given the green light to CIOs and IT teams to move their core systems operations to public clouds in order to accommodate the sudden shift in operating environments and the work culture. Given the above, at Lauren, we believe that by adopting some, if not all, of the above guidelines' enterprises will find themselves more able to not just sustain/ survive but even continue to carry out planned revenue strategies albeit with a set-back on timelines. Below are some of the benefits businesses could get by adopting these changes:
With Indian IT giant and global system integrator Tata Consultancy Services recently announcing that they plan to move almost 75% of their employees to a work from home model by 2025, it won’t be long before a vast majority of the service industry jumps on the bandwagon.
The adoption of the cloud and enforcement of certain best practices around cyber security that will be taken today could go a long way in helping CIO’s and their teams to enable and secure the growing remote workforce for years to come. While we’ve stressed on the importance of prioritizing cloud adoption and a zero trust security model, in such times, agile and lean teams, quick decision making, and forward-looking IT teams will not just help meet immediate business needs but also create value for their companies by setting up and enabling the remote workforces and accelerating digital transformation.
How can Lauren help
Our Approach
- Remote Working checklist
Best practices around Cyber Security- On premise and Cloud, Backup, Passwords, Mobile equipment, Privileged Users, Phishing Emails and Scams, Usage Policies, Remote Working- Video and Audio meetings, Change Management, Cyber-attacks and incident response, Help desk and Support
- Security and Cloud Advisory services
4 Step Process
Lauren's advisors engage with you to assess your current environment based on industry best practices and then together develop plans to improve alignment with business objectives. We then make recommendations to you supplemented by an execution plan.
Deliverables:
For our remote working checklist please get in touch with us at info@lauren.co.in.
Conclusion
This study shows that early cloud adopters have gained substantiated benefits over the years but even more so in the pandemic scenario that we find ourselves in. Additionally, such businesses have been able to continue to innovate and respond faster to the changing needs of their business- whether employees, suppliers or customers. But that said, it is not too late in the day for CIOs and IT teams to make this transition, however, security considerations should not be compromised.
We witnessed the question around cloud adoption change from “why” to “when” over the last few years. Are we going to see a similar trend around the adoption of the WFH or WFA models and if yes, are you ready for it?
