By Dominik Birgelen, CEO of oneclick
In the past couple of years, the demand for hybrid working has led businesses to transform the way they operate and build their long-term strategies. It is clear that hybrid working culture is here to stay. The working model is crucial for organisations as it helps them save significant costs, boost productivity, and most importantly, meet employee expectations, with 73% of employees demanding flexible working. However, not all businesses are able to leverage hybrid working to its full potential due to several reasons such as lack of appropriate technology, insufficient digital training, and cybersecurity risks.
Businesses that want to remain ahead of the curve must navigate ways to thrive in the modern working environment. Beginning with the right implementation strategy and technology, organisations can make a significant difference in their hybrid working practices.
Appropriate Implementation
Organisations must analyse barriers that prevent them from leveraging hybrid working to its full potential and develop suitable strategies to establish future-oriented changes. Of course, implementation of new technologies is necessary, but it comes with its own challenges. Businesses need to redefine processes, provide employees with appropriate training, ensure cybersecurity, and comply with regulations. What’s more, complexities and expensive on-premises solutions only make it difficult for companies to advance their infrastructure.
To simplify implementation and make it more effective, enterprises can leverage cloud-based solutions that can be managed remotely, are highly scalable, and do not require in-depth knowledge. This makes it easy for businesses to deploy, manage and maintain their infrastructure. It can also significantly improve the efficiency of companies’ hybrid working models.
Appropriately choosing a vendor that offers a suitable cloud-based solution is crucial. Organisations should sufficiently determine their individual requirements for the solution and consider both compliance requirements, and the provider’s security concept to sustainably benefit from the implementation.
Securing Infrastructure
Secure solutions and training about cybersecurity best practices are necessary, but may not be enough. Hackers are always looking for ways to penetrate, and hybrid working environments often increase the threat surface of businesses and make them more vulnerable. To ensure high-level cybersecurity, organisations must adopt additional security solutions based on zero trust architecture (ZTA). This ensures that each user is authenticated regardless of whether they are internal or external.
In addition, ZTA-based solutions also monitor user-activity, and validate their trust status at certain time intervals. In case of any unusual activity that poses risk, these solutions interrupt granted access and notify relevant authorities within the company. This is highly beneficial for hybrid working as these solutions allow businesses to protect defined company resources instead of individual network segments.
2023’s Tech Stack: Two Must-Have Technologies to Embrace Hybrid Working
To thrive in today’s business landscape, businesses must harness a combination of different innovative solutions that not only focus on facilitating operations but also improve employee experience, reduce costs, and most importantly, strengthen cybersecurity. Organisations can add below solutions to step up to the plate and make the most of the hybrid working model:
- Tech to Create Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS)
With DaaS, companies can provide a modern workplace and end-user experience that not only helps attract and retain new talent, but also strengthens cybersecurity. By leveraging DaaS, organisations can foster a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) culture that allows them to save IT costs and increase employee productivity while enhancing security. Employees can have secure access to the required information regardless of their location, device, or operating system while working with a browser and not processing data on endpoints – thanks to DaaS. This reduces security risk as data, software deployment and updates are easily and centrally managed. In this way, companies gain more control over their IT and increase security. In addition, DaaS is highly scalable and even allows organisations to opt for a subscription model that can help them save significant costs. For hosted desktop deployments, it is recommended that enterprises opt for external secure solutions that provide a robust, scalable, and secure environment.
- VDI in Cloud
Virtual-desktop-infrastructure (VDI) in the cloud allows businesses to outsource back-end management to a third-party vendor. VDI in the cloud provides organisations with all benefits including remote access to employees, simplified desktop management, enhanced security, on-premises VDI and more. But, to take advantage of these business benefits, companies do not need to invest in in-house computing, storage, and network infrastructure required to set up VDI in a local data centre. Instead, organisations can just pay for what they use while leveraging the latest innovations. The maintenance and updates are carried out by the chosen provider, who hosts VDI, on an ongoing basis.
The state of the current economic climate is not conducive to expanding IT budgets, and organisations who lean on cloud-based technologies, can secure their IT and leverage hybrid working to its ultimate potential without putting any cost pressures.
