We are operating during unprecedented times. This pandemic’s challenges have forced companies to halt all air travel, stop face-to-face customer meetings, and even internal meetings have had to shift to something much different – video conferencing.
As a result of this remote nature, companies have moved from a digital transformation journey to a digital transformation sprint. Businesses must continue to operate. IT organizations worldwide have had to adapt, adopt, pivot, and swivel to support these new digital needs. While many have coined it ‘work from home’, it truly is a ‘work from anywhere’ strategy.
So, what does work from anywhere entail? What challenges does it present? What are some of the solutions on the market to help companies overcome these challenges?
In this video interview, IT Consultant, David Chapa, sits down with Shefali Chinni of VMware to discuss the challenges of remote work and how VMware SD-WAN makes it possible to work from anywhere.
Connectivity is Key
Just four years ago, customers’ viewpoints about VDI and Desktop-as-a-Service were, ‘Yeah, maybe for some of our mobile employees, but I don’t see this taking off in mainstream IT’.
Now VDI and Desktop-as-a-Service are crucial strategies for many. However, even beyond VDI, if you don’t have decent connectivity to your corporate datacenter, you can’t even get to step one of your work from anywhere. That is the ability to work and be productive.
Remote work presents many challenges from a consistent connectivity performance and reliability perspective, no matter the location (but especially at home).
Those of you with kids who may still be remote learning find that sharing bandwidth between your kids, your significant other, and yourself places considerable pressure on the network’s performance and reliability.
Compromise
How many times have you IT Ops professionals tried to troubleshoot something remotely and finally decided to offer a workaround or a less than secure solution to get the business user working again?
Even if it is a 1% compromise in security, that is too high, but sometimes you do what you have to do to allow the end-user to be productive, but now you’re left with a security hole. Or perhaps your company has multiple VPNs it has gone through over the years, and some are still using the very low-end VPN for access. There are a host of issues that can crop up under this new model, including:
- Performance
- Security
- Reliability
Short of having a private circuit running to your employees’ homes, you must use what you have available to make things work.
Our New Normal Needs New Strategies
Work from anywhere is a reality and no longer a concept, but you need to have solutions to support this new working style. With large enterprises putting a stake in the ground for continued work from home initiatives, this means something must be added to help provide a better experience.
We have learned some valuable lessons during this pandemic around our new normal ‘mainstream IT’ and ‘business as usual’.
- Teleconferencing works, and we get more done
- A distributed workforce can be as productive if not more by working from home or anywhere
- Consumer-grade internet service from home cannot handle the sudden influx of increased bandwidth needs
- Conducting business and personal activities on the same network is sub-optimal
- There is an increased need for a highly reliable VPN connectivity
I have found that SD-WAN solutions deliver a low cost, high performing, and reliable solution compared to a traditional WAN deployment. In a nutshell, it can simplify your work from home experience by improving your application performance and increase overall reliability.
If you’re in the market, or thoroughly researching these solutions, take a close look at the industry-leading VMware SD-WAN solution. VMware SD-WAN has now extended its capabilities into the world of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) that combines cloud networking and cloud security architectures together for enterprises embracing the cloud and SaaS. Thus, VMware SD-WAN delivers the much-needed assurance of application performance, intrinsic security, operational simplicity, and reducing the overall total cost of ownership.
Resource:
VMware SD-WAN: Zero Trust Service
