What is happening with remote work?
Businesses across the globe had been experimenting with the work-from-home environment for some time now. The COVID-19 pandemic has only intensified that transition toward remote work. Due to the pandemic, many companies have even mandated their employees to work from home.
In the short term, working remotely is a necessity, but in the long term, it is very likely that working remotely will become a norm. Once people realize the possibility of working from home, begin to experience increased productivity, and get to enjoy the many benefits of working remotely, companies may find it difficult to get the employees back to the office.
As more and more employees start working remotely, the changing landscape of work raises some serious questions:
How are you responding to the IT needs of this new breed of employees?
How is your IT support adapting to this change?
Are your IT and Security policies robust enough to handle this?
Does your IT infrastructure have systems in place for sustained remote work?
What Are The Challenges In Providing IT Support To Remote Workers?
Remote work poses technological challenges that IT teams of small businesses aren’t prepared for. The traditional IT support and security systems are designed for offices where all employees are under one roof and connected to a single secure network environment. They don’t have the infrastructure necessary to support a complete transition to remote work.
In addition, most employees of small businesses are unlikely to have had much remote work experience. Combine this inexperience with the changing cybersecurity threat landscape and you can see how risky the whole situation is.
Here’s a list of the key IT support challenges faced when dealing with remote work:
1. Home Network Infrastructure Challenges
The foremost IT challenge of dealing with work-from-home is related to the network infrastructure of the end-user. Your company has zero control over what kind of network equipment your employees use at home. Poor security of connected mobile and IoT devices opens up the network to Pandora’s box of threats. There will likely be serious security holes that need to be plugged.
In addition, the typical home network is built using consumer-grade network equipment and isn’t designed to handle the load when everyone at home uses it simultaneously. Even though the bandwidth provided by the home user’s ISP (Internet Service Provider) may be sufficient, limitations of the network equipment and configuration mistakes can cause bandwidth bottlenecks. Remote workers may experience problems with real-time services such as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and video conferencing while others on the network are playing online games or streaming videos.
2. Cybersecurity Threats
A good security system works silently in the background without demanding too much effort from the end-user. So ideally, the focus of your security systems should be on facilitating the work rather than on creating new hurdles. In a remote environment, this is easier said than done. The network security issues aren’t the only vulnerabilities that your IT support has to deal with. Many of the security risks arise from the poor cybersecurity hygiene of your employees.
When evaluating the preparedness of your work-from-home IT Security, consider the following security questions:
Are your employees using company-issued devices or personal devices for accessing company data?
How can the risk of unauthorized physical access to devices be mitigated?
If personal devices are used, how can IT support ensure the security of the network? How will the risks arising from the use of external storage media be mitigated?
Given the massive spike in phishing attacks, are your employees trained to identify phishing emails and other online frauds?
Are your work-from-home and telecommuting policies up-to-date and cover the security and privacy arrangements?
3. VPN Issues
Even though Virtual Private Network (VPN) is quite common nowadays, most companies are unlikely to have their infrastructure set up for massive remote access. VPN connections will reduce the speed of your internet connection. Although this reduction in speed is not usually so noticeable, in times of high traffic, it may get aggravated. Your VPN may not be able to support the necessary sessions or provide the necessary bandwidth when the VPN core is flooded. Slow VPN connections can be a serious problem if it is being employed to access on-premise servers or software.
In order to mitigate the performance and service issues associated with remote access, you may require special configurations. This will add some complexity to your network connection and may need dedicated network management for monitoring your private network connection.
4. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) Limitations
Although virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology such as Citrix, VirtualBox, Amazon WorkSpaces, Workstation Pro, etc. enable remote work, they have their nagging limitations. There’s no offline mode with VDI; remote employees can only work if they are online and connected. Moreover, because the computing power is transferred from the data center to the remote endpoint users, performance usually suffers. VDI will often work poorly or not at all. This is especially true for graphics-heavy software such as SolidWorks and AutoCAD.
The user experience is also not the best because often the application loaded on the VDI instance is often different from the one the employees are used to running on their local machines. Transitioning to an all-remote work environment may require scaling up your VDI solution. This will require you to scale up your server and networking infrastructure as well. Since you can’t rely on the computing power of the home devices of your employees, in order to compensate for it, you may also need to scale up your server storage RAM, and bandwidth. Therefore, scaling your VDI solution will likely be an expensive and time-consuming affair.
5. Security And Compliance Issues
Your security and compliance systems were likely built around the traditional work environment where all or most of your employees worked under one roof and connected directly to the secure office network infrastructure. Each business has to comply with regional and federal regulations. This is a critical requirement and they become increasingly stringent with each passing year. The regulations and compliance requirements are particularly stringent when dealing with data and privacy.
A remote work environment may present additional challenges to your IT security and compliance policies. Consider the following questions:
Where does your data reside while your employees work remotely?
Does your data loss prevention policy prevent unauthorized download or sharing of sensitive data? How is this monitored?
While your employees work remotely, how can you mitigate insider risks such as data leakage, IT theft, etc.?
How do you ensure your remote employees comply with your data retention policy?
For operating a fully remote work environment, you will need robust IT security and compliance policies to adequately secure your IT infrastructure as well as to demonstrate your compliance.
Setting Up IT Support For Remote Workers
Working remotely can have many benefits such as increased productivity and a healthy and happy workforce. But this needs to be achieved without increasing IT security risks or compromising on compliance requirements as well as without unnecessarily burdening the end-user. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a lot of focus on work-from-home and associated productivity challenges. However, IT support challenges continue to remain in the shadows.
The biggest challenge in providing IT support for remote workers is perhaps the inability to “drop-in”. IT support is not always about technical problems, many times the assurance of a face-to-face chat relieves most of the stress associated with puzzling problems. Remote support tools have limitations and problems that require physical inspection remain a challenge. Even seasoned IT teams may struggle to cope with meeting all the requirements of a work-from-home environment.
Implementing a remote working program will require major changes not just to your IT infrastructure but also to how you provide IT support to your remote employees. Setting off on the right foot will help your business seamlessly transition among remote-only, office-remote hybrid, and office-only environments.
If you would like to learn more about how your business can overcome the IT support challenges, feel free to reach out to us.
If you liked the blog, please share it with your friends
About The Author
Hari SubediMarketing Manager at Jones IT
Hari is an online marketing professional with a focus on content marketing. He writes on topics related to IT, Security, Small Business, and Mindfulness. He is also the founder and managing director of Girivar Kft., a business services company located in Budapest, Hungary.