The pandemic is affecting every sector of the business industry, and information technology is not an exception. As government regulations and social distancing measures are implemented, it comes as no surprise that the increase in remote working has resulted in alarming challenges of remote working for employers in mid-market and large enterprises. While the current crisis encouraged them to become more creative, it also inhibited their ability to deliver and support rapidly evolving organizational needs.
With work-from-home expected to grow, the need to be aware of remote working challenges for managers is crucial in meeting customer expectations and thriving amidst digital disruptions. By knowing these challenges, leaders can align culture with strategy and ensure digital transformation success. With that, here’s how cloud-based solutions can help forward-thinking organizations resolve these challenges and stay on top of their processes in a remote IT environment.
1. Cybersecurity
As IT leaders embrace digital information and new ways of working in the current crisis, keeping sensitive business data safe and secure is a growing difficulty for most organizations. After all, warding off cyberattacks in a remote environment requires a coordinated effort across all organizational levels. The advantage of cloud-based solutions is it centralizes applications and data, providing leaders with end-to-end application lifecycle management.
Business networks are made up of various devices and endpoints that can be difficult to manage in a remote IT environment. By using cloud-based solutions, you can enhance traffic analysis and streamline the tracking of network events. It also allows you to implement disaster recovery plans easily and quickly when they are managed in a centralized location, resulting in fewer network and policy updates.
2. Data Accessibility
High data availability is critical in running a business efficiently and achieving compliance with evolving security regulations. Depending on the organization, the type of data it depends on to function, and the services it provides, the magnitude of the impact from unavailable data can vary significantly. Inconsistent changes in data availability increase the likelihood of catastrophic implications such as business-wide disruption for some organizations.
Using cloud-based solutions, IT leaders can provide interoperability in a remote environment and make it easier for authorized users to access data anywhere. When on the cloud, clients, partners and employees can access and update data without losing security level and protection. This also reduces the cost of managing data and allows for business continuity should a natural disaster or power failure occur.
3. Skills Gap
Ensuring cybersecurity is one of the challenges of managing remote employees as threat actors find sophisticated ways to exploit vulnerabilities. What makes this even more frustrating is that there are not enough IT professionals with cybersecurity skills to deal with them. Recent data reveals that 40% of IT decision-makers believe their teams have gaps in their cyber security skills.
The data further identifies IT as the most difficult area to find employees. By leveraging innovative cloud-based solutions, companies can resolve the skills gap and allow their employees to meet IT optimization goals without having to hire professionals with cyber degrees. Cloud solutions are brimming with extensive features that help with strategic, technical, tactical initiatives while providing expertise on specific cloud environments to help guide the remote IT teams successfully.
4. Regulatory Compliance
With compliance functions evolving and the IT industry getting regulated, it becomes even more difficult for organizations to maintain their compliance programs. Throughout the years, the changes within the geo-political environment and regulatory scrutiny have altered the way organizations do business and resulted in compliance becoming an unnecessary burden. An excellent way to overcome these challenges and comply with the innovative set of changes is using cloud-based solutions.
Cloud-based solutions provide organizations with an unprecedented level of control over what is run, installed, and accessed on company devices within a remote IT environment. By setting controls in place, you can stay a step ahead of evolving security threats, technology shifts, and changes in regulatory requirements. Moreover, cloud solutions also follow a risk-based approach to comply with these changes to provide greater flexibility to adapt to changing conditions and increase transparency through clear outcomes and accountability.
5. Maintaining 24/7 Uptime
One of the working-from-home technology issues is having a reliable network. As IT processes shift remotely, maintaining 24/7 uptime is key to tracking assets and data effectively and aligning with modern business requirements. However, ensuring 24/7 uptime in a remote IT environment can be tricky depending on the number of employees and the devices connected to your networks.
Luckily, cloud-based solutions can maintain high availability by providing more device connectivity and unlimited data storage. This can be crucial for organizations that gather real-time data and access large volumes of information as part of their operations. Without having to worry about data storage and maintaining uptime, organizations can scale as their business grows and gain a peace of mind knowing that their data is securely stored in a streamlined location.
Overcoming Remote IT Environment Challenges
Threats and changes in the IT environment are inevitable. Therefore, organizations must be proactive and use powerful solutions such as Apptimized Safebox to keep issues and threats away from your IT environment. Apptimized Safebox which is brimming with dynamic capabilities such as white labeling offers a comprehensive product demonstration in addition to its quote-based pricing packages.