Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Meta’s enforced hybrid work plan is failing badly, and Meta makes more layoffs. (more…)
Tag: remote workforce
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80% of Bosses ‘Regret’ Stopping WFH ¦ PSA: Disable STS!
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Rethinking return-to-office mandates and a ridiculous, ancient Windows bug. (more…)
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WTH? WFH is 6× Pre-Covid ¦ Plus: Agile Sucks (Redux)
Welcome to
The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Working from home is here to stay, and Agile is still a failure. (more…)
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Dead Downtown: It’s YOUR Fault | Pentagon’s FOUR Cloud Vendors | Apple Adds MORE Price Flexibility
Welcome to
The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Home working is ripping the heart out of cities, the DoD’s bizarre cloud strategy, and Apple adds a $10,000 app price option. (more…)
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Successful Software Development in a Hybrid Environment
The desire to work from home or from anywhere has only increased as the COVID-19 pandemic lingers. Employees cite a number of reasons why they prefer to skip the office, including cutting commuting times, being more productive, caring for family members and exploring new locations. People are increasingly comfortable with remote interactions and the new technology tools that have sprouted to support the work-from-anywhere trend. On average, employees said they want to work from home 2.5 days a week, according to a monthly survey of 5,000 Americans, while 73% of employees seek hybrid work environments where they have some flexibility in where and when they work.
The rapid spread of the COVID-19 Delta variant also prevented employers from enforcing a full-time return to the office. As a result, the new normal for today’s workforce will remain hybrid at best—a few days in the office and a few days working at home. We are a workforce in transition. For many companies, this has put an unnecessary strain on their digital transformation initiatives.
A question remains: How can companies continue to innovate and execute on their software development initiatives with their employees separated from their teams and offices? Here are some of my recommendations for helping organizations to continue their software development projects in today’s hybrid work environment:
Inclusive Environments
Hybrid workforces require a highly inclusive environment. As a nearshore IT partner that works with hundreds of clients remotely, we ensure that our teams have the same access to managers, HR and the technology necessary to succeed on projects and to productively engage with clients. For example, we have learned that the best way to be inclusive is to take either an all-virtual or all-in-person approach during client meetings. It’s also critical to train your managers to provide the same advancement opportunities to employees regardless of whether they are in or out of the office. From the executive team on down, everyone needs to support employees, regardless of where they are. The same goes for onboarding new employees and partners—a mostly virtual process over the past 18 months. Increasing online mentoring and onboarding platforms to connect employees and to manage client projects while the workforce is hybrid is another significant approach we have taken to ensure everyone feels included and engaged.
Collaboration and Knowledge-Sharing
Employees were abruptly forced to transition away from the office where they were used to frequent impromptu meetings and lunchroom chats. For many, this shift had a negative impact on brainstorming, collaboration and knowledge-sharing and thus, innovation. We give our teams the flexibility to use different technology tools to make up for what they miss most in an office environment—regular, casual human interactions. Our teams use a variety of communications tools for frequent check-ins to connect with clients and their co-workers. As a result, our people say they are more engaged with team members and clients than ever before. They are doing more impromptu chats and “instant” meetings with colleagues and clients as if they were in the office. We also migrated to video conferencing as our communication channel of choice. Video conferencing tools increase engagement and allow team members to join virtual meetings anywhere from their preferred devices. The ability for teams to interact, share and collaborate wherever they are is essential to developing cutting-edge teams and software.
Trusting Cultures
According to the Harvard Business Review, 34% of employees felt that their supervisors “expressed a lack of confidence in their work skills,” and an even more significant number of workers reported feeling that they needed to be constantly available to prove themselves. Sentiments like these highlight a lack of trust, impacting development outcomes. Employers need to trust that their employees are working diligently and consistently throughout the workday or whenever they can successfully complete the tasks at hand. For example, working remotely allows individuals to work when they feel most productive. Organizations need to recognize individual productivity cycles and understand that different team members may be productive during different times of the day, including outside of normal business hours.
Being transparent, forthcoming and open about expectations are keys to building trust with employees. Successful digital transformations and innovative software development are only possible with the right team and people. From a client’s perspective, these are the types of IT partners they want on their side. Technical aptitude and an environment where all employees feel valued, trusted and motivated to do their best are critical for developing effective digital solutions.
Employees have made it clear that they don’t want to be back in the office full time. For many organizations, a return to normalcy centers on developing a hybrid workforce that can work effectively with digital development partners. Creating the right environment and strengthening employee relationships are keys to ensuring software development projects can continue successfully in today’s new normal.
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The Biggest Motivators and Barriers for SD-WAN Adoption in 2021
The SD-WAN market has exploded in 2020, driven by the need to support increasingly remote workforces, the emergence of the AI-driven WAN and the requirement to deliver branch performance that matches campus networks. As enterprises look at the year ahead, support for the distributed workforce remains a top priority, and SD-WAN is a crucial technology that businesses need to invest in to thrive in the “new normal.”
As we head into 2021, these are the biggest motivators for the enterprise to adopt SD-WAN:
- Increased demand for robust video quality: The days of in-person conferences and meetings have been traded with back-to-back Zoom calls. Though lags and connectivity issues are understandable, they can be frustrating and ultimately lead to decreased productivity. Experiencing these issues has increased the demand for more robust and higher bandwidth network connectivity, which is critical for video communications. This increasing demand is expected to continue to rise—although some businesses are planning to return to the office, many are adopting a hybrid work model that will require at last part-time remote work.
- Boosting bandwidth without breaking the bank: Outside of video calls, the surge in remote work has increased pressure on overall network bandwidth. The solution for organizations is, of course, to add more bandwidth, but doing so can be expensive. SD-WAN is an attractive option for increased bandwidth pressure because it’s a solution that can meet bandwidth pressure demands while remaining cost-effective.
- Centrally operated networks needed for distributed sites: Once enterprise video quality and bandwidth needs are fulfilled, the next step is to ensure that IT teams have the resources they need to effectively operate remote networks and deliver a great user experience from client to cloud. SD-WAN is a useful IT tool for network management because it provides full visibility into what’s happening across the network. And with the recent emergence of AI-driven WAN solutions, IT teams have more tools than ever before to get insight into user experience, enabling them to proactively and remotely resolve issues.
Despite the many benefits of SD-WAN, there are still a number of barriers that are keeping enterprises from adopting this technology, including:
- Concerns about quality of service (QoS) for applications across WAN: With SD-WAN solutions shifting traffic away from dedicated private circuits towards the public internet to reduce cost, businesses are often concerned about their ability to assure QoS for their critical applications. These businesses should look for solutions that provide insights into the experience from client to cloud as well as leverage data science and AI to detect anomalies. They should also automate the root cause determination and resolution through self-driving or IT actions.
- Lack of insight into user experience: Many SD-WAN solutions lack the insight into both user and app experience from wireless to wired to WAN, whether due to the use of link-based VPN connections rather than session-based protection and/or the lack of rich streaming telemetry from the network devices to a modern cloud-based AI system. New AI-driven solutions and session-based technologies are now available that can improve this insight to simplify network operations and assure great user experiences from client to cloud.
- Securing remote sites from potential security threats: By further extending the threat surfaces with a more distributed workforce, many organizations are concerned about the potential security threats that a distributed network could introduce. To mitigate this, it is critical to look for solutions that embrace a connected security paradigm that delivers insight into threats across the network while automating mitigation and enforcing security policies at the edge.
- Limited technical skills and knowledge: A common perceived barrier to SD-WAN adoption is the concern that there is a significant learning curve for the technology and not enough existing skills to plan and manage it. This is a valid concern, though there are solutions. First, some SD-WAN providers offer managed services and can oversee deployment for customers through an outsourced or hybrid IT model. Second, organizations can invest in closing the skills gap via training. Though the latter option can be more time-consuming, investing in employees to learn the skills can help enterprises save money in the long run and move the industry forward by up-leveling important technical skills that are increasing in demand.
Though there are notable barriers to SD-WAN adoption, there are also solutions for each one. If enterprises can overcome these barriers, implementing SD-WAN has the potential to improve scale, bring agility, unify policy and boost security efficacy through a collapsed and integrated AI-driven network. Deploying SD-WAN can be a significant investment for companies, but in the long run, the technology is an important step in moving enterprises into the next generation of networking.
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Catchpoint Provides Free Remote Monitoring Tools to Help Combat COVID-19 Pandemic
Catchpoint announced today it will provide free access to tools to monitor remote network connections to help organizations that are helping to combat the COVID-19 virus by requiring employees to work from home.
Company CEO Mehdi Daoudi said supporting an entire workforce that suddenly needs to work remotely is clearly a major IT challenge. To enable IT teams to cope with that transition, Catchpoint is providing access to free tools that monitor access to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications using agent software installed on endpoints. The company also makes available a browser extension through which remote users can discover instantly what is slowing down application performance, which they can then share with their IT support teams.
Catchpoint is also making available an Enterprise Digital Experience Monitoring for free for 90 days to IT organizations that want to more proactively monitor application experience. That service is based on a Global Monitoring Network that consists of 825 worldwide locations through which Catchpoint monitors network traffic flows.
With large numbers of workers accessing applications remotely, many IT teams are about to discover how intermittent network access from home can be. Not all neighborhoods and residences have access to the same levels of network bandwidth. With more workers trying to access backend network services remotely—some with children who are home from school because of COVID-19—the probability of connectivity issues is high for the next several months. In addition, Daoudi noted the need to have employees working from home could go on for as long as three to six months, which means many employees may decide to relocate to other places, such as summer residences, where connectivity is not as robust as their primary home service.
Rather than viewing the virus outbreak as roughly the equivalent of an extended snowstorm, IT teams would be well-advised to make sure critical employees have access to multiple networks. In some cases, that may mean providing employees with multiple wireless access cards for different networks in case the services provided by one carrier become overly taxed or simply inaccessible. Daoudi said Catchpoint is already seeing divergent levels of network performance between carriers operating in the same geographic regions.
At the same time, IT teams that operate in highly regulated industries may want to make sure employees are not inadvertently making use of their neighbor’s wireless network—or, potentially worse, accessing applications over a wireless network provided by their local café.
It’s too early to say with any certainty just how fragile network services in the months ahead may become. What is clear is providing network bandwidth and making certain those connections are secure requires a lot of planning on the part of internal IT teams. In some localities, there is still time to put those contingency plans in place. Elsewhere, employees are already being told to work from home by local and state officials.
Whatever the outcome, the dependency organizations have on IT and IT professionals is about to become more apparent than ever.
