When working from home suddenly became the “new normal”, many employees had to revert to mobile phones for inbound and outbound calling.
This brought unforeseen problems, including an increase in costs and heightened security and identity risks – but many businesses are unaware that the solution may be sitting unused on their desktop.
Many of the collaboration tools that have been adopted by companies during this period of lockdown can also provide public telephony service. But having been rolled out in haste, these additional services have in many cases not been unified.
Now is the time to fix this, as home working endures as part of the new normal.
Counting the cost of a hurried tech roll-out
One of the most widely used collaboration tools, Microsoft Teams, illustrates how businesses can benefit from unifying their communications systems. We discuss Microsoft Teams specifically here, but the same principles apply to many other collaboration and communication platforms.
Teams has seen a massive increase in usage, with a 775% increase and over 75 million active daily users since lockdown measures were implemented across the world. Many organisations have rapidly deployed Teams to enable employees to keep in touch with colleagues, while staying safe. At Atos, we saw some of our large government customers go from a few users in proof of concept groups to 20,000 users within days after lockdown.
Organisations are now facing the reality that it will be some considerable time before offices will revert back to ‘normal’ and a large proportion, if not all, colleagues will remain working at home for the foreseeable future even after lockdown ends.
What was a quick temporary fix in deploying Microsoft Teams is therefore becoming the long term solution. In many cases this solution was always the long-term strategy, but one which was not intended to be implemented at such pace and short notice.
As a result of this rapid roll-out, considerations on specific team configuration (based on user personas), detailed security and communication with customers and other external bodies were not always able to be considered in time. And several months later, many companies are feeling the effects of a considerable increase in their mobile phone costs, and focusing greater attention on the security aspects of working from home.
