In Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series, we established that forward-thinking organizations are prioritizing technology investments to ensure business growth and long-term relevance. This includes getting prepared—and fast—to enable work-from-anywhere models.
The concept of remote work is not new. Yet, according to Riverbed’s Future of Work survey, 69% of business leaders said they were not completely prepared to support extensive remote work at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. And technology performance issues amongst their remote workers impacted both the individuals and business as a whole through reduced employee productivity (37%); increased anxiety (36%); and increased difficulty engaging with customers (34%). As a result, 61% of business leaders plan to make investments over the next year to enhance remote work performance.
Wise investments given the widely-held belief that the office of the future will be increasingly hybrid and distributed. As employees become more comfortable in the post-pandemic world and begin to move about, work-from-home will transition to work-from-anywhere. Employers also realize there are benefits to remote work—cost savings, employee retention, talent acquisition—to name a few. In fact, many leading brands, including Twitter, Square and Nationwide, are already paving the way by expanding their remote work policies and/or extending them “forever.”
CIOs and their teams are at the heart of helping their organizations enable work-from-anywhere models. But for remote employees, the unpredictability of network and application performance dramatically increases. They face unique issues—poor network stability and saturated local connections due to simultaneous access of bandwidth-intensive collaboration apps like video streaming and large file sharing—all of which negatively impact workforce productivity. Riverbed helps enterprises address these productivity challenges, maximizing application performance through massive data reduction and latency mitigation. Workforces can stay productive anywhere, anytime with fast, consistent, and available applications they need to get work done.
In a highly distributed world, cross-domain visibility of the expanded network is a must for security and resiliency. This requires a network performance management (NPM) solution that captures telemetry from every packet, flow, and device in context and then leverages machine learning, AI analytics and visualization to empower action. This gives organizations the control they need to enable work-from-anywhere models and to proactively identify and quickly troubleshoot network and application performance and security problems.
Anywhere can be an office, but only with the right technology. Join us on November 17, 2020 for the Riverbed Global User Conference 2020, a one-day virtual event that will equip technology professionals and IT practitioners with the essential capabilities they need to maximize performance and visibility of any network for any application to all users, anywhere. Don’t miss the opportunity to get insights, inspiration and to connect with peers, industry leaders, and technology experts across industries. Registration is free and open now.
UPDATE: All Riverbed User Conference materials are now available on-demand here.