The COVID-19 pandemic continues to push modern businesses to the extreme. The markets are constantly fluctuating, the trends come and go at an incredible pace, and no one can tell for sure what tomorrow may bring.
However, one thing remains constant – the ever-increasing dependence on high-grade, enterprise-level IT services. The need for IT experts and data scientists has never been greater. They have become vital to maintaining service continuity in the digital business sector.
Modern businesses have to consistently maintain a network architecture necessary to keep up with the latest challenges in the business world to ensure network operations continue running steadily. One of these challenges is supporting a remote workforce.
Thankfully, modern enterprises have many IT tools at their disposal, such as an IT service desk and support tickets to support both their business goals and end-users. The trick is to build a flexible and scalable enterprise network architecture that can quickly scale to any level of operation needed and according to your remote work needs. In this context, understanding the benefits of using virtual phone number for remote team becomes crucial, as it can significantly enhance remote communication capabilities within such a flexible network.
Since remote work is the future of business, let’s delve deeper into how to prepare your network for the challenges associated with managing a remote workforce.
IT support tickets and service desk
The first step is to ensure easy access to your IT service desk for each employee. If any issues arise, they can immediately create a support ticket and receive the necessary assistance. You’ll also need seasoned support staff to provide a suitable response to each reported issue.
The best way to ensure your employee support is operating at peak performance is to integrate your service desk ticketing system with existing authentication tools, network monitoring tools, and remote support solutions.
That allows you to create a unified, centralized system for tracking your authentication, monitoring, performance baseline history, and a database of all previous and ongoing remote employee issues. Your support team will be able to resolve issues in real-time, mitigate problems as they arise, and manage your remote team more effectively.
Keep in mind that the IT tools allowing your desk service staff to monitor and control remote devices and systems when resolving employee issues can help to enhance efficiencies while minimizing response times.
Business continuity plan (BCP)
Creating a BCP is one of the best ways to evaluate your telework preparedness and the risk that comes with this business model. It also ensures your critical business operations and processes continue running during a crisis, emergency, or disaster.
If the unimaginable happens, you’ll have a backup of your operations that your IT team can use to quickly and effectively keep your business up and running without risking your brand reputation and consumer trust.
Creating an effective BCP includes the following details:
- BCP doesn’t focus solely on the technical aspect of your business but also on your personnel.
- Its primary consideration is your business continuity.
- Such a plan also ensures that you have all your sensitive business data backed up and safely stored externally in a secure solution.
- BCP also provides your organization with an agile operational environment, including an updated checklist of vital data to help your staff maintain contact during a crisis.
- A business continuity plan should also include incident response activities.
Make sure you test your BCP prior to any crisis to make sure the data contained is easily accessible and available on-demand.
Monitoring requirements
Once you have your IT tools and BCP deployed, your enterprise is ready to take your remote work efforts to the next level. From here, it all comes down to the best practices regarding remote access, telework, and cybersecurity. There are certain things you can do to ensure safe, secure, and successful telework:
- Enable scalability – migrate business workloads to cloud-based, scalable, and more secure solutions designed to accommodate remote work.
- Adopt cloud-based solutions to minimize the attack surface – cloud-based solutions are designed to provide an increased level of security using the latest encryption, communication, and storage technologies.
- Enforce zero-trust access – ensure all users must be authorized and authenticated before they access your critical business data and applications.
Use SD-WAN to develop a centrally managed enterprise network architecture with wireless and broadband networks that you can customize any way you deem necessary.
SD-WAN is an excellent solution for saving time, effort, and resources managing and configuring your business networks as it simplifies control of the WAN through a virtual, policy-driven, and automated infrastructure.
Conclusion
The best way to ensure a thriving remote work environment is by migrating existing processes and workloads to a multitenant cloud-based, scalable solution. You also need to maintain BCP capable of supporting employee ID and authentication requirements and business goals and integrate the latest IT tools across all IT platforms. It can also help mitigate any remote data management and cybersecurity risks.
