Making “Interesting” Times a Little Less Interesting… with TEM

By Tanya Seda, Chief Strategy Officer

As I write this, the world is in the midst of a health crisis unmatched in modern times.  Our personal and professional lives have been disrupted, and it’s easy to believe that the world has changed for the foreseeable future.  But even with the stress and uncertainty so many of us face, businesses are adapting and finding new ways of working, most notably with most employees operating remotely.

For some enterprises, the shift to remote workers happened years ago. If you’re one of those, you understand that when sharing a space with others who aren’t working (spouse, kids, pets), you need some private workspaces and rules about acceptable interruptions. More importantly, you’ve already installed the necessary broadband capacity, office equipment, conferencing and supporting technology to be productive.

But if you are used to a distributed workforce or not, there are new challenges. IT teams designed and staffed for a small, steady number of remote workers are suddenly faced with hundreds or even thousands of newly-remote users all accessing infrastructure that was built for a fraction of the load. With that in mind, here are some important considerations:

Infrastructure Issues

Much of the technology enabling remote work has been around for decades, though improvements have made it more agile and user-friendly over the years. Unfortunately, for today’s emergency remote work policies, the underlying hardware, software and support infrastructure are usually designed for a small subset of the overall workforce. Adding capacity for many remote work components is hard for some without significant planning, procurement, and testing. Enterprises looking to expand their remote workforce policies should look into the following areas:

• VPN Capacity Core to remote connectivity is the ability for employees to connect to resources like applications, file shares, email systems or databases securely on private networks via a VPN. For the majority of companies that haven’t migrated their infrastructure entirely to public clouds like AWS, this would require more network bandwidth. Also, VPN hardware capacity and number of user licenses for VPN software have to be added. Some of these efforts require circuit upgrades that could take weeks. With that in mind, you might consider transitioning to SaaS products to deliver enterprise services like Office suites (Office 365), CRM (Salesforce) and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams.  This way employees can access core capabilities without needing to establish a private VPN session. A TEM provider can help assess the need for circuit upgrades and obtain pricing quickly to get you up and running in a secure private environment, but at least you’ll be operational until the expanded capabilities are in place.
• VoIP capacity and remote number extension Another functional area getting hit hard from this outbreak is the call center, since most of them rely on a VoIP system. While many of these products can support remote agents over a VPN, it creates yet another capacity problem when the number of users per hour increase. The setup process for things like call forwarding, along with the likely required capacity expansion needs a strategy in place to be successful. Even today, call centers are set up to handle the majority of traffic in a physical, onsite location. Flipping this on its head can cause call quality issues if not handled properly. The right TEM consultant can help assess the need to add more agents and track costs, so important for major operational shifts.
• VDI services Typically, businesses use traditional, enterprise applications that were never designed to operate with anything slower than a 100Mbps LAN between clients and servers. The only remote option for legacy applications is some form of VDI.  To keep things running smoothly, you’ll want help to look for issues that might arise with your suddenly distributed workforce. In many cases, the IT team has never had to spend much time looking at the legacy environment because it just keeps humming along, but that’s changed now!

The bottom line is that most IT teams right now are drowning in calls from frustrated workers and employees unfamiliar with the complexities and nuances of remote connectivity, causing a massive backlog of support problems. The last thing they have time for right now is assessing the delivery of new services, capacity expansions and support processes that address critical problems, not to mention maintain a handle on the expenses for this new model.  The good news is, a TEM partner can work together with you through these challenging times, assessing infrastructure needs, procuring those new services at appropriate costs and service levels, and track all new expenses as they flow through our system.

Be safe, be well, and call Network Control for help navigating these “interesting” times!