3 basic requirements for successful home office

Why hybrid working needs new IT investments

Hybrid working combines office and home office days, creating new requirements for collaboration, network and security that classic office structures do not cover.

According to surveys, more than half of employees plan to continue working from home long-term or pursue a hybrid approach. However, this working model comes with complexities for company networks and infrastructures. IT departments need to set new policies and make the right investments to ensure continuous improvements in employee productivity and effectiveness in the hybrid model. Although every company has its own approach and its own infrastructure, the IT requirements are very often similar. To prepare for the hybrid working model, there are always three issues to deal with.

Investment 1: collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams

Collaboration is made easier, efficiency increases. Collaboration tools ensure that knowledge in the company is made easily accessible and transparent for everyone in a central location at all times. With the help of collaboration tools, e-mail floods are a thing of the past. You can form working groups in which all communication relating to the project can be tracked and all documents used are stored centrally. You can work in these documents in parallel. There are no different versions, the file is always up to date.

Groups or teams can be created in different “visibilities”: public, managed, closed. This significantly promotes exchange within a team, because collaboration tools make working together so easy. Whether it is a quick question, a vote, a photo, a video or a statement: with the reply function, everyone can easily get involved and react within the “protected” framework of the group or team. This creates new project-oriented networks within the company, increases the visibility of individuals within the company and gives project groups a more pronounced group feeling.

Investment 2: a modern network with SD-WAN

Companies must be able to cope with the heavy use of cloud applications in home offices and the associated changes in their data network. The cloud has provided a lifeline for many businesses during the pandemic. Increasing reliance on the cloud must go hand in hand with the adoption of secure internet breakout and software-defined networking technologies for the office and home office to enable optimized application performance.

SD-WAN as a software-defined network: SD-WAN and shared portals are essential for long-term hybrid working in companies. Companies need a sophisticated SD-WAN solution that prioritizes data traffic and allocates bandwidth optimally. This keeps cloud usage performant and stable without applications slowing down or crashing. Prioritization across network boundaries prevents bottlenecks and protects critical processes. These technologies increase agility, stability and reliability. SD-WAN allows secure prioritization of, for example, video conferences and cloud access (SaaS) directly via the internet.

Investment 3: security based on Zero Trust

Hybrid working has expanded the cyber threat landscape. Combating it has become a top priority for IT managers, and the threat of criminal hacker attacks is looming.

Home office as a security risk: The basic problem with working from home is that employees use networks that are not under the company’s control. These must initially always be regarded as insecure. It is therefore important to ensure that the connection to the company network and access to company data from these networks is secure.

Attack scenarios in the home office do not differ significantly from those in corporate environments. Employees working from home are more susceptible to such attacks because they cannot quickly ask a colleague for advice when they receive a suspicious email. Instead of taking the trouble to make a request to customer support, they may make the wrong decision themselves.

Zero Trust as a solution: A Zero Trust architecture can provide a remedy here. This assumes that no user, no request and no service that wants to access the company network is trustworthy until it proves otherwise: applications are mapped in the cloud via connectors and can only be used individually by authorized users, without them even having to be in the company network. The legitimate user only sees the application they need to work with. Unlike in the corporate network via VPN, other applications remain hidden and inaccessible. Models such as SASE bundle SD-WAN and Zero Trust access control directly from the cloud.