DUBAI, UAE — The workforce of today is highly dispersed, with individuals logging in from multiple devices across their primary residences, vacation homes, customer sites, coffee shops, hotels, and other locations. Globally, 62 percent of employees have chosen a hybrid work structure, while in the UAE, over 66 percent of employees have reported their preference for working from home, according to a report by Michael Page.
As firms continue to adopt the “productivity everywhere” mentality and implement hybrid work models, it is essential to maintain effective and efficient user experience to ensure business operations continue to function seamlessly. It has been stated that 95 percent of professionals who engage in remote work encounter IT challenges that impede productivity. From unified communications as a service (UCaaS) quality concerns to VPN access challenges to apps in corporate data centers, productivity hurdles can have a negative effect on the entire organization.
In the past, on-site employees could simply stroll down the hall to IT and explain the problems they were encountering. Even better, they could ask their colleagues for technical tips or determine if they were experiencing the same issue. Now, submitting a helpdesk ticket from a remote location has become a necessity. As a result of IT personnel being inundated with requests, response times have increased. This has negative effects on employee happiness and productivity for all parties involved.
Considering all the different networking resources hybrid workers rely on, such as UCaaS and SaaS applications, wired and wireless performance in corporate offices, remote access services, such as Virtual Private Networks (VPN), and infrastructure services, the complexity of ensuring quality performance and user experience becomes more apparent.
Automated and continuous network testing and user emulation enable IT personnel to replicate difficulties, proactively detect issues, and identify the underlying root cause of performance degradations. Increased visibility enables IT personnel to lower mean time to repair (MTTR) and enhance overall efficiency and output. By proactively monitoring performance, application degradations and network sluggishness can be heavily mitigated, hence reducing the negative impact on the user experience.
Whether individuals spend time in their corporate office or their home office – or any other remote locations – their expectations for the quality of service they require will remain the same, regardless of the location. Now that is the possibilities of work from anywhere have been opened up, there is no turning back.
Gaurav Mohan is VP, SAARC & Middle East, NETSCOUT.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and may not reflect the editorial policy or an official position held by TRENDS.