The easing of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in many regions across the globe is seeing the opening up of businesses that have been closed or functioning via a significant number of employees working remotely are facing many issues surrounding their return to the office.
Alan Shen, Vice President of Consulting Services at Unify Square, a company whose software and services optimise and enhance the world’s largest collaboration and communication deployments, says many of these problems are related to the solutions they have been using at home.
“I’ve been working in the Unified Communications sector for 12 years and back then endpoints were static and consisted of fixed desk phones tethered to fixed lines which then extended to mobile comms in cars and hotel rooms which became a challenge for IT to manage – especially for executives on the end of a poor Wi-Fi connection.
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Alan Shen[/caption]
In a way, lockdown has simplified comms, and delivered a sense of complacency. Today, the homeworker has basically reverted to that static scenario by using a single device connected to a home WiFi network. You could say that remote working has taken away all the variability IT had become familiar with.
But underneath that deskbound remote worker lies a sleeping bear that will most likely be awoken by their pent-up desire to reconnect with people back in the office. As offices open up a hybrid mode of working will become common; meetings will see a cluster of people in the office and another cluster still based at home.
Video meetings have taken off during the lockdown period and when it comes to its growth rate, video conference company Zoom has lived up to its name as use of the firm's software jumped 30-fold in April. At its peak, the firm counted more than 300 million daily participants in virtual meetings.
This surge in video usage at home will bring expectation of using the application into the office and for IT this means that WAN and Internet bandwidth will need to be up to speed to ensure user quality expectations. If you combine this requirement with the fact that the easing of lockdown will see the return of mobile workers wanting to connect via video from an array of locations, then there’s likely to be some pain.
Do More with Less
Another return to work business scenario is likely to come in to play here; how are IT budgets standing up?
Most budgets are under pressure already but now IT are going to be asked to do more with less as the push for more applications to go to the cloud and additional Software as a Service (SaaS) licensing takes more funds away from the budget.
Enterprises need to be made aware of this and whilst some will already be aware of the problem others will not have undertaken a digital transformation yet.
Consider too the SaaS vendors providing these video solutions; it’s a highly competitive landscape where suppliers, in their headlong COVID-19 motivated rush to gain a meaningful customer base, deferred monetisation and secured their users at almost any cost.
At some point there will pressure on these suppliers to increase business from all of their customers who need to realise the implications of using something for free as it’s likely to be monetised through all the data being exchanged.”
So how can Unify Square help enterprises with these return to work scenarios?
