In pursuit of a sustainable collaboration stack for remote-ready business continuity, many IT buyers are seeking to refine and consolidate the tools their teams are using — streamlining and avoiding duplication, while ensuring that the necessary elements are firmly in place.
Teams love the flexibility of working remotely and on the move, and organisations benefit from remote-readiness, and being able to retain motivated talent in turbulent times. But simply giving them the tools to connect with each other isn’t enough for long-term stability — which is why GoToConnect is offering new bundled services, to underpin a resilient location-independent strategy, for teams of any size and industry.
Joseph Walsh, Senior Manager, Global Product Marketing of LogMeIn’s GoTo Products, explained that the UC aspect is only the first part, of a strategy which requires three layers for true stability.
Collaborating when you work-from-anywhere
“Of course the first of those challenges is communication and collaboration,” he explained — something that LogMeIn know a bit about, after 18 years in the space and makers one of the leading videoconferencing tools.
“Online, it’s harder to replicate those face-to-face in the office water cooler moments, right? But we’ve built great tools to bring people together, to connect people — ensuring we foster creativity and innovation and create an environment people can brainstorm effectively, wherever they are working.”
These are the manifest achievements of tools like GoToConnect and the whole UC industry, which has kept the world working through the pandemic period, revolutionising the way we work together forever.
Supporting work-from-anywhere
But the second leg of the tripod is support, because when people are distributed, there’s no IT team down the hall who can pop up to your desk and fix things when they stop working.
Delays in accessing support impact productivity across the board, as Walsh pointed out. “If my phone’s broken, does that mean I can’t talk to customers for a few days? Do I need to go to shop to buy a new phone, or somebody from HQ has to get in the car and drive to me to fix it?
“The new GoToConnect bundles include tools where support can remotely log onto someone’s device with GoToAssist — they can come in and see, is there something wrong with the settings? Is it user error? Maybe it’s a broadband connectivity issue or something like that — they can run tests, from a remote location, so they can support me in the right way.”
In this way, the essential visible component of the strategy is kept working: because all that collaboration and communication depends on the tools working correctly together, with no faults in the hardware or software on which it relies.
Securing work-from-anywhere
Any two-legged structure is fundamentally unstable, though, and what invisibly ensures the whole work-from-anywhere strategy succeeds is the third pillar: security.
The GoToConnect Standard+ and Premium bundle subscriptions all include password management and multi-factor authentication (MFA) with LastPass Teams or Business — because distributed working increases vulnerabilities in ways which are harder to secure, and effective solutions must take account of this.
As Walsh explained, “people may be working on personal Wi-Fi, they might be sitting in a café, or like McDonald’s or Starbucks. They may be doing things like bring your own application or bring your own device, using their own mobile phones for accessing corporate data.
“This way of working increases attack surface by six to eight times for cyber criminals to get in, so there’s simply a bigger challenge securing all that in a hybrid or remote environment.”
So as organisations seek to consolidate their communications and collaboration platforms going forward, it’s essential they do not forget the less visible elements of supporting and securing distributed working, even if corners may have been cut during the global emergency.
GoToConnect’s bundle services make it easy to implement robust and sustainable work from anywhere practices, which ensure that productivity and security are appropriately positioned, whatever (and wherever) the future of work takes us all.
