The Future of Remote Working (and How Your Business Should Adapt)

With an extraordinary number of employees now working from home, many companies are being forced to quickly adapt to a remote-only infrastructure. For some companies, these changes are going to be fleeting – a stopgap measure to keep the doors open. For other companies, this may very well become the new normal.

Remote working can be an incredible benefit to both employees and employers, but it depends on how the employee-employer relationship works, and how swiftly employers are able to evolve to meet the coming changes.

The Future of Remote Working

Analysts believe that many of the employees currently working from home may never return to the office. Now that the infrastructure has been designed, and now that the technology has been purchased, there is little reason for businesses to not take advantage of it.

For both employees and employers, there are a few major benefits to working from home:

• Employees are happier. They have greater work/life balance. They are able to better set their schedules, they can work in the comfort of their own home, and they are able to drop their commute.
• Employers save money. Employers don’t need to maintain large, brick-and-mortar offices, and they are able to let their employees take care of their own essentials, such as their home office and utilities.
• Employers can hire employees from anywhere. Remote workers of all talents can be discovered throughout the country or even throughout the world, giving employers access to previously untapped potential.

Despite this, many employers had refrained from shifting to a remote-only infrastructure due to the cost of adoption. Remote infrastructure requires not only a complete change in IT platforms, but a complete change in business processes. These are monumental changes that previously may have been seen as being prohibitively expensive.

Now that employers have been forced to adopt remote working processes regardless, many employers may have already cleared the most prominent hurdle towards adoption. Furthermore, many companies looking to reduce their expenses and operate with leaner budgets are going to find that doing so through remote work is exceedingly effective.

The Problems with Remote Working

None of this is to say that there aren’t some problems presented by working from home. Businesses may find themselves countering a number of issues as they learn to adjust, including:

• Transitioning to work from the cloud. Companies with on-premises solutions are finding that they need to abruptly move their solutions to the cloud, or find other workarounds so that their employees are able to reliably collaborate from home.
• Ensuring employees remain productive. One of the greatest concerns for a business, companies need to adjust their processes and their platforms to compensate for remote work, in terms of measuring employee productivity and ensuring that employees are motivated and focused.
• Countering technical issues. When employees have technical issues at home, who is there to fix them? Either the company can send an IT professional out to their home, or they need other resources, such as the ability to easily remote desktop in. (Even so, remote desktop solutions aren’t going to help if the employee is having problems with their printer.)
• Maintaining security and compliance. Security and compliance are major and growing issues, and employees working remotely can become potential weak links. Cloud-based infrastructure has to be designed to reduce the chances that employees could potentially be compromised.

Some companies are finding themselves having to race to find the answers to these solutions. Trying to make major decisions about an organization’s infrastructure in haste is always a recipe for disaster, but if an organization needs to build an infrastructure virtually overnight, there are some priorities that may fall by the wayside.

Prepare Your Business Now with an MSP

Aside from the benefits of teleworking, there’s also the necessity. There may come times when companies simply need to support telework. Red River’s Remote Assist includes everything that a business needs to quickly deploy a remote workforce. This includes virtual desktops, Microsoft Teams, and Azure Disaster Recovery. With Red River Remote Assist, companies can begin operating remotely now, ensuring that they’re able to maintain their workflow.

• Virtual desktop. Employees are able to work in a familiar environment; a virtualized desktop that can be accessed anywhere through the cloud.
• Microsoft Teams. To improve upon communication, MS Teams can be used for text chat, video chat, and more. Microsoft Teams is a fully featured, fully integrated collaborative solution.
• Azure Disaster Recovery. Don’t worry about losing your data. Azure Disaster Recovery will ensure that your data is backed up, and that it can be re-deployed with just a few clicks in the event that data is lost or compromised.

Not every business is going to be comfortable with remote working. There are some businesses that simply demand in-office collaboration. But for many businesses, the writing is on the wall: Remote working is the work of the future.

Are you ready to get started? Contact Red River today with your questions about remote infrastructure.