Currently, the Delta variant continues to ravage the United States while about half the population is vaccinated, returning to offices, and resuming many normal activities. Even while we navigate these uncertain, confusing times, it’s clear the pandemic changed the way we work and continues to affect workplaces.
According to a CNBC article, “Recent polling of HR leaders by research firm Gartner found that the percentage of companies saying they would reopen workplaces in Q3 2021 fell by more than half from when it asked in late April to July 28, when it most recently canvassed HR executives.” Post-vaccine, a hybrid model with many people continuing to work remotely will likely be prevalent throughout the rest of the year and possibly permanently.
A Computer Weekly article also notes that “despite the massive investment in remote access infrastructure, most companies have continued to struggle supporting remote workers.” While the pandemic turned many of us into remote workers, we presented serious IT challenges to helpdesks—and those challenges are not going away.
Let’s look at some of these challenges that continue to impact organizations.
Instead of using a robust IT network at an office with plenty of internet bandwidth, employees suddenly relied on their home networks that were not built with office use in mind. These home networks got strained with parents using videoconferencing for work, kids using videoconferencing and remote learning applications, and members of the family streaming movies or TV shows.
This situation leads to many support calls about “performance issues.” We put that phrase in quotes because it relates to technical issues often outside of our control—such as the type of internet package an employee uses at home and the behavior of family members.
If a particular internet service cannot handle that much streaming video at once, if an employee’s wireless equipment cannot handle the amount of bandwidth going through it, and if too many family members are trying to use bandwidth-heavy applications at the same time, then the best solution is often an internet upgrade that the employee—not the organization—must decide to deploy. Otherwise, there is not much a helpdesk can do about limited internet bandwidth at an employee’s home.
The BYOD trend has existed for many years, but the pandemic heavily increased the use of personal devices for work. Practicality drove much of this trend during the pandemic. It’s easy to use the devices you own at home for work, and it’s cheaper for organizations to avoid buying hardware. Yet, with so many employees using their own devices for work, IT helpdesks often have no control over what software and applications are running on these devices. They also don’t often meet minimum specifications such as security standards and processing power. These limitations can make it hard to support such devices.
It’s risky when remote access solutions such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are thrown together in a hurry to accommodate remote workers. Many VPNs are set up and configured incorrectly, and many security vulnerabilities exist that can compromise your data and systems.
The security of these solutions is always our biggest worry. Organizations using VPNs often don’t follow basic best practices such as requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA), applying patches and updates, and running a VPN on appropriate hardware and software.
VPNs work best with organization-owned devices. Secured, typically browser-based remote portals and cloud-hosted applications work best with employee-owned computers. Avoiding the use of an uncertain VPN is especially important when employees use a weakly secured wi-fi connection (such as public wi-fi) or a home network that’s not secured properly. Many VPNs were not properly planned and deployed, and so the lack of appropriate capacity, licenses, and oversight cause many support calls.
While current global supply chain issues involve many factors, one key factor was everybody suddenly needing a laptop for remote work. This demand contributed to the current global computer chip shortage, which has all IT vendors scrambling to find equipment. (If you’ve been having problems ordering equipment and getting it delivered on time, you are definitely not alone.)
This situation also introduced the challenge of setting up many, many new laptops for clients. During the past 12 months, we may have spent more labor hours on this job than anything else!
As employees shifted heavily to working remote, cyberattackers followed them. Knowing these at-home employees were softer targets than in the office, cyberattackers increased the sophistication of their attacks by:
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) even released a report earlier this year highlighting how cyberattackers are using the vulnerabilities of remote workers to enter cloud-based systems.
These are serious problems and a challenge to any IT vendor or staff attempting to support remote workers. How have we stepped up to address these challenges?
It’s important that your IT staff or vendor is continually learning as times change. Some areas where we’ve had to adapt include:
Educating our clients was often tough because the pandemic created so much urgency (and even panic in some cases) related to getting remote solutions going. While we helped get these remote solutions up as fast as possible, we also needed to educate clients about security risks related to their new remote solutions. Some ways to mitigate those risks included:
The shift toward more remote workers makes this a perfect time to leverage cloud solutions whenever possible and appropriate. One of the most important cloud solution benefits is to give employees access to an application from anywhere. For that reason, organizations already using cloud solutions had a leg up on this pandemic when it hit.
As we’ve discussed in the past, the cloud provides remote workers resiliency against cyberattacks, lessens the risk of permanent data loss, provides accesses to an application anytime/anywhere, and offers better technical support. Cloud solutions adapt well to a remote workforce, and we encourage clients to explore cloud solutions whenever feasible.
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