No matter what goes on around us, we are truly stronger together. I am grateful for the work that our clients in fire, police, health care, utilities, local government, and other essential services are doing on the front lines every day.
My hat also goes off to the other heroes of this story... the information technology professionals at these organizations and others who are working in the background to make sure that everyone has the resources they need to keep doing their jobs. Some companies had already made the leap and were encouraging work from home while others had the tools in place but no immediate plans for rolling them out company-wide. A shift that would have taken years had to happen overnight. There was no time for testing, change management, and the development of new HR policies.
Not only did corporate applications and files need to be available remotely and securely but so does your corporate video conferencing platform. Video calls have skyrocketed, kind of ironic that now that many of us don’t need to dress up to go to the office everyone wants to see you on camera. It appears the traditional conference call is dead; video is the new normal.
Everyone expected the same performance at home as they had in the office. Fair enough, it’s one thing to wait a few extra seconds for a file to download, quite another to try and have a video call where your customer or boss ends up sounding like a robot about to power down. Applications that were designed to operate over a corporate LAN often aren't able to cope with the move to home networks and wireless. Network disruptions as devices move between Wi-fi access points or even cell towers and in and out of coverage altogether can play havoc on productivity. So can reductions in bandwidth each afternoon as online gaming and Netflix usage peak in your house and messages like ‘network not found’, ‘please log-on, ‘error’, ‘loading…’ and ‘session timed out’ bring your important Microsoft Teams call to a standstill.
Most legacy VPN applications were designed to provide a secure remote connection on a stable network. They were not designed for improving the quality of video conferencing and maintaining application persistence when roaming or on unstable networks with high packet loss. They are also unable to quickly identify problems and provide you the insight you need to solve them. That is where VPN products from companies like ConvergentIS partner NetMotion come in. NetMotion is designed to improve that experience and make your mobile workers more productive.
It will be interesting to see what the long-term impact of all this will be. My guess is that working from home will be a lot more prevalent than it was before the pandemic and that there will also be a lot more emphasis put on the employee user experience. Just being able to connect will no longer be good enough.
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