#GoToGetsIT: This article is part of an ongoing series from GoTo’s thought leaders on the frontlines: Our Solutions Consultants deeply understand our customers’ unique challenges and connect the right solutions to meet their goals using GoTo technology. Here, they share their industry knowledge on what it takes to help businesses everywhere thrive in a remote or hybrid world.
As a proud career telecommuter, I was extolling the virtues of virtual work for over a decade-and-a-half before COVID-19 struck. Then suddenly in 2020, everyone in the workforce had a need for virtual meetings, webinars, cloud telephony, remote support tools, and remote access products. My work selling remote collaboration tools, IP phone systems, and IT remote services suddenly tripled. Our company, like most others, went pandemic-virtual, and soon after made the decision to remain remote-centric. Today, most of us still work from our remote locations, and the work/life balance is of such high quality in this virtual environment, it’s hard to envision any significant changes coming soon.
The workspace is (and probably always will be) digital
In speaking daily with GoTo’s extensive customer base across all sectors, spanning all types of industries, it’s become clear that this somewhat new, hybrid-flexible virtual work arrangement is here to stay. Perhaps folks have one day a week from home, or the flexibility to switch offices mid-day, or work on a weekend, or from a month-long Airbnb rental somewhere far from home.
There are plenty of blogs out there that talk about the best digital setup, the actual architecture behind the data, and the tools that employees will need to access. Whether you’re working from home, from a resort in Florida, or from a slightly dismantled office, we now need an organized “space” in the cloud or accessible via our VPN, that will help us keep centrality and maintain order to our organizations and departmental resources more than ever.
A person might be accessing content from their mobile phone as they wait in the school pickup line or are waiting for a flight in an airport, meaning we now must account for and accommodate a variety of personal mobile devices in addition to laptops. Company landing pages that have clear communications and links to the tools remote workers need to be available and the tools residing under these links and structure better be reliable, easy, and secure.
It's all about the layout
“Easy” means being able to quickly find that corporate-approved app, or your team’s resource page, or simply not getting lost in a SharePoint jungle. Internal approval processes to define what’s accessible and where it resides become critical. Some questions to consider might be:
- Will you use Microsoft 365 and SSO for approved apps only?
- Do all your existing applications and services support SSO, if that is the route you take?
- If you’re not using SSO, how are you going to grant access to the software licenses and applications in a secure manner?
- Is your VPN robust enough to handle added traffic?
- Is your authentication methodology up to date?
Consider your current tools for IT management and support
Besides employee access to tools and resources, there are also your internal teams’ tools to account for: at a minimum, IT should have the ability to monitor every remote machine and connect to it for regular maintenance. Using a tool like GoTo Resolve makes tasks like remote monitoring and management (RMM), helpdesk, conversational ticketing, and detailed reporting, simple and safe. That’s because these apps use 256-bit AES encryption that can’t be disabled and have a robust infrastructure and security methodology that is always running behind the scenes.
Knowing that an employee has the latest Windows updates, is up to date with antivirus protection, or simply being able to keep tabs on what they’ve been installing (and uninstalling) is extremely valuable – and keeps the rest of your organization secure. Pushing out new software via MSIs, getting alerts when a machine is becoming over-tasked so IT can reboot it remotely are valuable time savers, and help your team service everyone more efficiently.
Find trustworthy companies and products to help
Things like zero trust security, strong encryption, and easy-to-understand interfaces are what you should be looking into. If you’re product shopping, look at its organization’s infrastructure:
- Do they have data centers located worldwide to load balance all the traffic they receive?
- Do they adhere to uptime service levels? Is support included?
- Is it free and is it 24/7? How long does it take to deploy?
- Do they have implementation-knowledgeable staff to help map out the process for you?
Trusted vendors, like GoTo, can make your own infrastructure easy to build out and maintain. Find a company that has years of experience in this space and take advantage of their knowledge to make your digital workspace the best space possible.