Everywhere Workplace: is agile working a necessity?

It seems so, recent research by DellTechnologies proves it. But what are the technological challenges that companies must master to truly work in an agile manner?  

Over the past year, for millions of workers facing a new way of working has been a forced and emergency experience, motivated by the need not to stop business. For companies, this necessity has turned into an advantage, but it has entailed numerous problems.

The research conducted by DellTechnologies “The new era of remote working” showed that we have reached a point of no return.

Today, 42 per cent of the companies surveyed consider the ability to work remotely a crucial component of the employee experience. They were only 30% in the pre-pandemic period, before directly experiencing the benefits.

Fears of reduced productivity, reduced ability to work as a team, and lowered company morale have been disproved by the research results, and the scales are tipped in favour of the benefits, such as savings on fixed costs, better integration of offices and satellite teams, higher employee satisfaction, and a better ability to activate new ways of doing business.

Agile working is therefore an increasingly viable option for companies. An element of competitive differentiation for 80% of the organisations surveyed, which aims to generate efficiency, decentralisation and innovation.

The move to a distributed working model reflects on IT in three respects:

• the first is that of managing the exponential growth of connected devices;
• the second is related to the increase in the problems of configuring remote workstations;
• the third relates to the increase in attacks targeting remotely connected users.

What are the problems generated by the growth of connected devices?

Employees, not being predominantly in the office, need to use alternative devices to access company resources and manage daily operations.

The use of business applications increased by 200 per cent year-on-year: this is a significant figure where mobile (laptop, smartphone) is the primary device of access.

In the face of this increased demand, from our observatory, we have seen companies facing new problems in several areas:

1. PROCUREMENT AND LOGISTICS

   We have seen considerable resources allocated to the purchase of new devices in order to get more of the company's employees up and running.
   
   Device supply issues characterised the early months of last year, causing employees' personal devices (BYODs) to take over the IT infrastructure.

   In the haste to avoid operational interruptions, asset management (components, software licences, services) was neglected, increasing the difficulties in determining the budget and verifying the adherence of expenditure to real need : who needs a PC? Who should I deliver it to?

2. PROVISIONING
   We have seen increasing difficulties in remotely configuring users' personal devices: how should I configure the PC? Based on what requirements?

3. INFRASTRUCTURE
   The increase in the number of devices has put the infrastructure capabilities of the network to the test. . 
   
   An active VPN on the mobile device simulates that the user is on the internal network, but the introduction of new users has required the computational capabilities of the infrastructure to be adjusted, putting the accessibility of the systems under strain.
   
   
4. COMPATIBILITY

   Another issue is the verification of compatibility between devices and company work tools: trivially, an outdated version of the operating system is enough to prevent access to the company network.

5. STANDARD
   Not least is the issue of standards:adaptation of devices to company policies and compliance standards is required. Non-compliant solutions may pose a risk of economic, security and image damage.

6. SECURITY

   Finally, devices need to be made secure, because they are no longer protected by perimeter firewalls, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations can be more easily exploited during an attack.

   An attack that could spread to other devices, once brought back inside the perimeter defences, or lead to the theft of corporate data by accessing resources on the cloud.

7. SUPPORT

   Finally, among the issues highlighted is the provision of support to users in new and difficult circumstances.

   With the introduction of new devices, the user's status quo changes. The latter finds itself with more devices for which to request support.

   New problems arise: different configurations, applications installed without authorisation, training. All this leads to an increase in support requests, which often take place under difficult conditions.

   The VPN may not work, it is impossible for the technician to physically put his hand on the PC, providing remote support is complicated.

   Unthinkable to think of adopting a proactive problem-solving approach.

How can these problems be adequately addressed?

One way could be to adopt a system that allows a timely inventory of IT resources.

Faced with the need to manage new devices, an excel file is no longer sufficient to govern this complexity in real time.

Where have these devices gone? Who is using them? How are they configured? What applications are installed? Without an answer to these simple questions, it is impossible to to plan daily activities:

• Without control, no action can be taken and the status of services cannot be monitored.
• The lack of timely information on the status of one's fleet can undermine the success of projects.

Through a timely inventory, support operations could be easily codified and automated with the support of Artificial Intelligence and automation bots.

Making work agile

The proliferation of mobile devices is closely linked to the spread of new agile ways of working. But there are technological issues and challenges without which it is difficult to achieve the required agility.

At WEGG we deal with Work From Anywhere and we have helped several companies to make work even more agile for users in an ever-changing world.