Digital enablement: 4 steps to enhancing your remote working setup

The last five years has seen a global shift towards more flexible, remote working patterns. Originally, this was implemented to keep people safe during uncertain times, but now this flexibility means that sitting at an allocated desk in one location for five days a week is as relevant in modern society as a fax machine.

Digital enablement, or use of technology to improve business operations, has played a crucial role in helping businesses adapt to new ways of working. By leveraging technology, such as public cloud solutions, companies were able to support remote teams and provide employees with the tools needed to be productive from any location. This has helped businesses continue to operate smoothly during times of crisis and has enabled them to remain competitive in an increasingly digital world.

Public cloud computing is no longer a ‘nice to have’, but a ‘must have’ for businesses.

Digitally transforming how your business runs will support your remote working teams and also positively impact your operations and processes. Digital enablement can help pave the way to drive a wide range of efficiencies. Here are four steps your business can take to enhance your remote working set up:

 

1. Superfast connectivity: multi-site global and businesses

Superfast connectivity is an important aspect of your businesses’ digital enablement. It ensures that all employees can continue to work as productively remotely as they would from your main office.

This is particularly significant for multi-site and global businesses with employees working in various locations around the world. By using Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS IPVPN), multi-site businesses can share IP services and data via high bandwidth core networks, enabling employees to gain access by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

 

MPLS IPVPN technology offers your business a number of benefits, including:

• Improved security. This technology provides a secure and private network for businesses to communicate and share data between their locations, helping you to protect sensitive information from being intercepted by third parties.
• Enhanced reliability. MPLS IPVPN uses multiple redundant connections to ensure that the network remains available even if one of the connections fails. ensuring that your business continues to operate smoothly and reliably.
• Greater flexibility, which allows businesses to easily add new locations to quickly adapt to changes in your operations and requirements.
• Improved performance by using advanced routing techniques to prioritise certain types of traffic, such as voice and video, and ensure that they are delivered with a high quality and low latency.

 

The first step to digital enablement is understanding the role of cloud technology. Become an expert in public, private, and hybrid cloud in 12 minutes by downloading your guide today.

 

 

2. Secure access to vital business resources

One in five businesses have experienced a data breach as a direct result of remote working. Yet currently, only 43% of employers use disk encryption on end-point devices. This leaves a majority of businesses with remote workers vulnerable to security breaches.

One way to secure your business is by using a resilient VPN. This encrypts the data that is sent between a user’s device and the server, making it difficult for anyone else to see or intercept the data. This will protect the users from being tracked or hacked while they are online and will help to safeguard sensitive customer information.

For remote workers, two-factor authentication (2FA) adds another layer of security to the VPN authentication process, making it harder for attackers to gain access to employee devices and corporate networks. 2FA requires users to provide a time-sensitive code that is sent to their mobile device every time they log in. As cyber-attacks increase, your digital enablement strategy should ensure that all your business data, accounts, and networks are safeguarded against any suspicious activity or illegitimate login attempts.

 

3. Provide employees with digitally-enabled equipment

Studies show that 30% of the UK workforce work remotely at least once a week. As time goes on, this number will only increase.

In order to allow your employees to work from home, it’s your duty as an employer to provide them with the right digitally enabled technology.

This includes:

• Web conferencing. This allows your business to host internal and external meetings that would otherwise be in-person, securely online.
• Instant messaging, enabling your team to communicate in real time and securely sharing vital information.
• Collaborative documents. Long gone are the days of saving files with ‘final version’ at the end. Services such as Google Docs ensure that everyone in your team can see, comment and amend the same document.

To provide this support, it is best practice to ave a hosted on-site telephony solution and remote workers to have a home router to easily connect to their network. This will drive greater collaboration between your staff and customers alike.

 

How can cloud computing increase employee collaboration and drive digital enablement across your business? Discover the differences between public, private, and hybrid cloud models and find out which is best for your business.

 

4. Access to the Public Cloud

Advancements in cloud technology allow businesses to transform their employee’s home offices. With the correct implementation, this provides remote workers with instant, secure access to the correct data and tools that they need to carry out their work effectively.

By using the public cloud, you can avoid the capital costs and maintenance expenses of owning and managing your own hardware that typically come with digital enablement, and can instead pay for only the resources you use on a pay-as-you-go basis. This allows you to reduce your expenses and increase operational efficiency.

Overall, the public cloud is a valuable resource for businesses that are looking to become digitally enabled and empower their remote workers, allowing them to access and use shared computing resources in a flexible and cost-effective way. By leveraging public cloud, organisations can increase their agility and reduce their expenses, helping them to remain competitive and successful in the marketplace.

 

Deploying digital enablement throughout your business

When digitally enabling your business for remote working, it’s important to question the following four areas:

1. Connectivity. Does your team have access to strong, reliable internet that makes it easy for them to connect?
2. Security. Are there ways a possible hardware, software, or network breach could take place due to your remote workers?
3. Equipment. Does your team have the correct hardware, such as a laptop, and software, such as instant messaging service, on their device?
4. Access. Does all of your team have unified access to important data, files, and software?

Ultimately, in order to digitally enable your team, they need unified access to the same files, documents, and systems as your on-site employees. Through a public cloud model, your business would be able to efficiently save and share documents, while minimising the overhead costs typically associated with on-premise hardware. Having easy access to this information would allow your team to effectively become digitally enabled, carrying out their role from the comfort of their own home.

 

Become a cloud expert

Learn everything you need to know about public, private, and hybrid cloud models in 12 minutes and discover the first steps to successful digital enablement by downloading your guide.