Ever since the birth of computer networking, a few short decades ago, working away from the corporate office has meant an inconsistent and degraded experience of IT.
It didn’t matter too much because remote workers were in a tiny minority. They were self-imposed exiles who had chosen to opt-out from the fast, reliable network and well-defined security perimeter of headquarters and the branch office. Given the limited consumption, they got the best IT could provide: slow connections, unreliable networks, patchy support and cumbersome extra layers of security.
This may not have been fair, but it was logical. Most of the investment in systems was bound to go where most of the people were. Secure access to applications is easier to organise for a bunch of people working in the same location than for a highly dispersed, ever-moving, distributed workforce.
It’s harder to impose technical and quality standards when people are trying to connect to the network in so many different ways. It’s harder to provide support when they’re not working down the hall - and even harder if they don’t stay still but insist on moving around.
“You can’t connect? Where are you? Starbucks, yeah right.” Cue rolling eyes in IT.
Digital equality is still elusive
No wonder the early adopters of mobile technology were called road warriors. You needed to be tough to survive. You needed a warrior spirit to cope with the constant technological disappointment of dropped signals, spooling connections and multiple logins.
The world has come a long way since the acoustic coupler and dial-up modem, but it is unfortunate that we still haven’t achieved digital equality. The quality of experience of the end-user significantly varies if you are working from the office versus anywhere else. Working from home or on the road can still be frustrating and much less productive than connecting to the same apps in the office.
This isn’t just a problem for the user but for the organization. What’s an acceptable productivity deficit for a remote worker – 5%, 10%, 20%?
Then there’s the operational calculation. What’s an acceptable overhead for supporting remote workers? What about the cost of upgrading their broadband or rolling out additional hardware if their home router isn’t fast enough?
An unacceptable trade-off
Research conducted by Enterprise Management Associates last year found that only around a third of IT teams believed they had fully succeeded in achieving parity between office and out-of-office when it came to experience of IT.
Most admitted that they still regard security and performance as a trade-off - a necessary evil. When they have to choose, most organizations choose security. Of course they do. In today's world, it regularly polls as the top IT priority.
We’ve reached the point where this compromise is unacceptable. The tipping point is demographics. The obvious and dramatic shift came in 2020. Since the pandemic, the IT world is no longer made up of an office-bound majority and a minority of mobile or home-based staff. Now a majority of the white-collar workforce is hybrid – working only part of the time in an office.
Even incremental losses of productivity, increases in frustration or additional IT overheads could scale up to serious issues of lost revenue, reduced job satisfaction or higher operational costs now that we’re no longer talking about tens or hundreds of people regularly spending time out of the office but thousands.
Has your organization doubled or tripled the size of its networking and security teams in the past four years to cope with the increased complexity of supporting the hybrid workforce? Probably not. The EMA research found little change in the size of post-pandemic IT organizations, but it did find other signs of strain. For example, respondents reported a 50% increase in the meantime to repair for IT issues affecting remote users.
Productivity jitters
Let’s be honest. Performance is less exciting than security. No one ever got sacked because the connection was a bit slow. It’s your wi-fi, it’s your broadband provider, it’s your 5G. Important work to do? Come into the office. See you Monday.
For many workers, a bit of jitter on Zoom, buffering applications and the occasional ten-minute file transfer are all figured into the working day. No big deal until you add up all those lost minutes, but that’s your problem, and Ms C-level. Your staff will likely put up with sub-par IT because they don’t know any different.
For a business relying on financial trades, or tight software development deadlines, or remote call centre staff updating confidential information during a VoIP session with a customer, quality and performance at the edge of the network is a bigger deal.
Take the case of the metaverse software developer racing to a deadline for a new product. The company’s remote developers can perform maybe two code check-ins involving very large file transfers each day. The team in the office can manage four or five. With the launch date in jeopardy, the company is so desperate to free up bandwidth it considers turning off security.
Far-fetched? No, a real example based on the experience of a Fortune 100 company.
We’re not going back to the office
Can’t we solve these problems with today’s technology? Sure. Up to a point. There’s an abundance of SD-WAN, VPN, ZTNA and SASE solutions. How much do you want to spend adapting them for a job they were never designed for? They were built for a world where centralized hub-and-spoke networks were the norm. If networking and security providers were building their systems from scratch for the hybrid workforce, they wouldn’t start from there. Instead, they would left-shift the networking and security stack to the client.
Also, they wouldn’t rely on hardware that has to be rolled out and maintained by engineers on site if they could do it all in software and run it centrally.
If you think we’re on a long slow U-turn back to the office, think again.
Millennials and GenZs make up an estimated 38% of the global workforce today. By 2030 that figure is expected to rise to 58% (PwC figures). This is the first true digital generation. They expect digital things to work – and they expect different things from work, including greater flexibility about when and where they work. If they can stream a 4K UHD Netflix series on their home broadband or mobile 5G connection, they expect a UHD Teams and Office 365 experience on that same connection.
Terms like remote work and work from home belong to the previous generation, whose frame of reference was the office. Tomorrow’s workforce may still go to the office sometimes, but work from anywhere will be the norm.
IT departments have done their best to stay ahead of this trend. It’s not their fault that legacy networking and security technology still hasn’t caught up.
