Many organisations have found that having the bulk of their workforce working remotely has caused them to become more productive, and employees have reported a greater level of satisfaction with this model of working.
But as companies worldwide introduce a staggered return to the office, they must review their operations to ensure that those productivity gains don’t get lost as they navigate hybrid working.
By 2022, a quarter of the global knowledge workforce will choose their home as their primary workplace, and 45 percent will be working from their home two to three days per week, according to research from Gartner.
Managed service providers (MSPs) and IT teams had to facilitate the mass shift to remote working in March 2020. Due to the unstructured approach to this speedy transition, many haven’t yet become proficient at dealing with issues related to remote working, and now they must get to grips with the hybrid working and an office that will have technology that looks nothing like it did pre-pandemic.
Ross Williams, Chief Product Officer at Virsae, told UC Today those organisations need to prepare their offices for end-to-end visibility and that video will remain a popular collaborative platform for employees.
“If you have to revert to using a desk phone when you’re back in the office, there’s going to be a loss of productivity and a loss of the gains that have been realised through the emergence of video during the pandemic,” he elaborated.
“No manager is going to want to lose that productivity and that connectedness that everyone’s developed over that period. Networks must be managed and revamped so that they can cater to this new way of working and flexibility that people have.”
One of the most pressing issues for IT managers is balancing the need for in-office voice solutions with that of the need for video software that connects office-based employees with their remote colleagues, and which can put a strain on the networks that have not been deployed to handle that workload.
“A lot of IT teams have their networks sorted and tuned for audio-only, which is a relatively narrow bandwidth,” Williams explained. “When you throw a video on top of that, that really puts the networks under stress and tests the quality of service (QoS) model. With QoS, if there is no contention for bandwidth then quite simply QoS isn’t tested, it only comes into play when there is contention. Many enterprises think they have effective QoS as pre-pandemic audio sessions were okay, but when they add video, some will find out the hard way that they don’t.”
IT teams also must be more disciplined in their approach to security, and in particular, the protection around SBCs, said Williams, adding that Virsae has seen over 608 million attempts from third parties to either register or make calls through their customers’ SBCs in September alone. Like with firewalls, SBC’s had to have holes punched to enable the remote workforce. Unmanaged SBC’s leaves enterprises blind to the activities of bad actors who are actively trying to exploit those holes.
How Virsae Helps
Virsae Service Management (VSM) is a simple way for IT teams to manage complex cloud and hybrid Unified Communications systems, and provides customers with the visibility they need to reduce risk, manage cost, and maintain the productivity gains they made during the pandemic. VSM combines big data with Machine Learning, AI-based analytics, automation, workflows, reporting and notifications that ensure seamless collaboration between distributed workforces.
