Everywhere Workplace: how to create agile workplaces

Workstations must be configured to achieve the agility required by the Everywhere Workplace. What are the challenges IT faces in creating agile workplaces? And how can it solve them?

We will continue to be mobile workers, not just in emergencies.

90 percent of HR leaders surveyed by Gartner admitted that they will continue to allow employees to work remotely, even after the vaccine is widely adopted. They see agile working as a crucial component of the employee experience, as well as a necessity for corporate business.

As a result, users expect to do their work from anywhere, at any time, using a variety of devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone). Until recently, mobile devices served only limited purposes (e.g. looking at emails). Now they are workstations in their own right.

The same work that used to be done in the office is now done on mobile devices, whether company-owned or personal. Employees need to run many of the same applications and services and access the same information.

IT needs to be able to provide applications and on-demand access to cloud resources to any type of device, whatever its location, to enable the employee to work remotely.

But what challenges do we face in managing mobile devices?

Everywhere workplace: the problems to be solved

In recent months, there has been a demand to set up remote workstations, motivated by the emergency (we have also discussed this here).

In a short time, the entire company had to be remotely operational and there were not enough devices for everyone. There were supply problems that were partly solved by the adoption of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), the employees' personal devices. Which had to be properly configured and secured.

From our observatory, we observed the following problems:

1) Manual or distributed provisioning across several management systems

We observed that most companies either perform the provisioning processes manually (configuration is up to the user, who accesses unprotected digital distribution services to download business applications) or manage them with separate tools.

There is often a separation between who manage desktops and laptops and who manage smartphones. The latter are usually managed by telecommunication staff, with different capabilities than their office "counterparts".

The adoption of separate management systems over time has led to:

• an incoherent experience
  

 In today's Everywhere Workplace, users depend on all their devices to do their work.

They therefore want to work as they are used to. Logging in from a laptop or smartphone on the move and not finding the application or configuration they are used to working with can block productivity. And increase requests to support.

• compliance policies and standards applied across the board

In order to work, standards and compliance policies are required. Without uniformity in the application of company policies, deployment is patchy, hiding gaps.

Without a strict access and security policy, corporate data on a BYOD device can be exposed to risks, perhaps due to co-existing applications. For example, all it takes is malware introduced by a game to expose corporate data stored on the device.

• slow boarding

The same policies need to be updated on multiple management systems. This leads to duplication of effort, which results in being slower when configuring user devices for initial onboarding.

Each change to the access and activation criteria has to be made several times.

2) the network is not properly configured

One of the biggest concerns with mobile devices and BYOD is sending or receiving data through insecure networks. Public Wi-Fi such as that in cafes, airports etc... a good hacker knows how to get around passwords.

We have seen that, in the absence of a perimeter, companies are increasingly resorting to the use of a VPN, which provides a secure, encrypted 'tunnel' allowing secure transmission between the off-site employee and the company, without third parties interfering.

Mobile devices should be configured with VPN access to the organisation. However, this is not always sufficient: in view of the boom in connected devices, it has happened that access to systems has been blocked due to incorrect planning of the infrastructure's computing resources.

3) security is insufficient

Another thing we have observed is the human factor: putting the onus on the employee to update the operating system or distribute the security patch is a risk. One cannot rely on a workforce that does not normally take security as seriously as it should.

Hackers have realised this and are exponentially increasing cyber-attacks. System vulnerabilities, weak passwords, insecure networks... they are striking on several fronts and are hitting back, causing severe economic and image damage.

However, there is an underlying lack of awareness that mobile requires ad hoc strategies and technologies, of continuous and absolute verification. Networks, users, devices, everything is validated before access: this is the Zero Trust approach, the benefits of which we are experiencing on our customers.

Another aspect we would like to emphasise is that security must not get in the way of productivity, which is why we believe that Zero Trust technologies such as Zero Sign-On (authentication without a password, but with context verification) are the present and the future of the Everywhere Workplace.

4) support has difficulty in intervening remotely

For an effective Everywhere Workplace, support must be able to take action remotely in the event of problems. It must have remote control functions, but also visibility into the context of the user's device and its health and safety status.

Without these conditions, support is faced with an increase in user requests without being able to automate even repetitive tasks.

If a hundred people who connect remotely have encountered problems with different operating systems, wouldn't it be useful to migrate even before the problem arises?

How to properly address these challenges

We have seen that different kinds of problems can be traced back to fragmented device management, with responsibilities being borne by the user or by different IT departments. Configurations, updates and operations occur without uniformity.

Our experience leads us to recommend the adoption of a single system in which to aggregate different data sources in order to have a real-time inventory on managed assets (devices, licences, etc.). Once we have visibility over the assets, we can trigger automatisms with the support of Artificial Intelligence and bots.

Provisioning, remote control, setting access conditions... from a single point, it is possible to create agile workstations and not to disperse all the information related to their operation.