While trying to provide work from home capability for the entire company during the pandemic, the thinking on business continuity for organizations’ is today evolving from localized, data-centric strategies to a global perspective to keep businesses running virtually. In order to ensure business continuity and resilience, organizations need to connect people, secure the business, and automate processes for the modern workforce.
Typically, organizations need to think of:
+ Providing base level connectivity: example Virtual Private Network (VPN)
+ Ensuring that basic collaboration tools such as e-mail, voice, instant messaging are functional and reliable
+ Determining appropriate access to critical applications in order to keep the business running securely
To empower a remote workforce and build a secure and distributed-work model, organizations seek remote collaboration solutions that are simple, reliable, and secure. Solutions designed to communicate, ideate, iterate from anywhere, anytime help employees working from home to safely connect with their teammates. Solutions like Cisco WebEx for example, ensue secure collaboration and make meetings seamless as meeting in person. This means it is possible to keep business running as usual during unexpected situations.
For remote employees to work from any device, at any time, from any location, solutions like Cisco VPN and Cisco Umbrella are useful. Additionally, solutions like Cisco Meraki help to securely extend the network and enable simple, secure, reliable internet access from anywhere. Likewise, Cisco SD-WAN helps improve performance, reduce costs, and enable robust security – all without direct IT intervention.
What the future holds
According to an IBM survey, 75% of more than 25,000 respondents indicated they would like to work remotely at least occasionally post-COVID. And 54% said they would like this to be their primary way of working. What was a slow transition to new ways of working has now accelerated to a point where organizations have to learn how to adapt so that they can shape, create, and design modern employee and customer experiences.
Returning to work
One of the top concerns for businesses while enabling their employees to return to work is safety and adherence to the guidelines issued by authorities. Social distancing has become the new normal, and companies need to manage their workspaces accordingly.
Solutions like Cisco Meraki MV cameras, together with Everyangle empower businesses to manage people in physical spaces. This solution can alert location managers in case of social distancing norm violations. In addition, solutions like Cisco DNA Spaces use location information from wireless signals, RFID tags, BLE etc. to analyse location information using cloud platforms, and enable density monitoring, proximity reporting, impact analysis, behavioural analytics and more.
In summary, solutions that help create a “Trusted Workplace – get back to the office” and deliver a comprehensive workplace experience to employees are not only effective but also enable organizations to effortlessly share content and protect work environments for a secure “return to work”.