working from home Archives

By J. Tyler Rohrer

The 9-to-5 workdays, the coffee breaks, the water cooler discussions — these are artifacts of a bygone time. Yes, remnants of them still permeate our corporate landscapes, operational workflows, social rituals and even our technology choices.

Recent events have launched a disruption of our daily work lives — but maybe that is just what we needed.

Right now, we face a choice of drastically slowing the global economy or compelling hundreds of millions of end users to be productive members of their organizations from home, right now. But the truth is this shift is possible.

And if it’s possible, what else is possible? What truly happens when you fundamentally change to a remote workforce versus preferring a primary campus attendance model? Secondly, what do you need to unleash this potential?

One of the first changes we have seen occurring for thousands of customers is that with remote working models, the best tend to rise to the top. Perhaps it is the lack of office politics or other constraints. But it’s more likely the result of added productivity of working when work needs to be done (not between eight arbitrary hours defined in a 1940s industrial model/production line economy). I want to use a phrase called “intrapreneurship.”

Unbridled in many ways, these remote office workers become not just stellar individual contributors — they become innovators. Having no formal training in psychology, I can only surmise what the possible effects of the comfort and agility, lack of bumper-to-bumper traffic and abbreviated eating and sleeping habits can have on productivity. But perhaps a better way of looking at this is to say we get back those minutes and hours we used to spend preparing for and navigating to and from work. This is not to say we are going to work more hours from home; we are going to work better hours.

As I think about this, it’s safe to say we have become an intellectual economy versus a manufacturing economy. So many of us no longer screw widgets on thingamajigs made by the low-cost bidder. Our service-based economy is based on intellectual property. Better said: ideas. And ideas flourish when people are liberated to pursue them unfettered by conventions or outmoded practices.

The internet is the greatest platform ever created by man for the proliferation of ideas. It is not for this reason only we should find models that use it to work. However, it is a compelling one. Virtualization, while it was and continues to be one of the greatest data-center recapitalizations of all time, also taught us the power of abstraction. Abstraction in the virtual technology vocabulary means the willingness to disassemble computer systems and re-assemble them in new ways using hypervisors and micro-services to replace prior system architectures. Abstraction becomes a key way to bypass our dependencies on any one device located in a single place. When the full capabilities of your computer can go anywhere at any time, then you can also work productively anywhere and at any time.

Moore’s law is something I refer to, as it is center stage in this new evolution of the modern workspace. The speed of processing power per dollar increases forever. There is no reason our new distributed, remote, work-from-home architectures cannot fully embrace this computing reality. A model with rich and robust edge devices and operating systems coupled with intelligent, pervasive, learning, secure, centralized and managed cloud services looks to be the ideal model.

The real disruption of this new work-from-home scenario is this: We are already emerging better, smarter and more agile. This is not a bumper sticker. This trend has been accelerating over the past decade, and adoption must move even faster if we are to equip ourselves to live in a world where “disasters” can now bypass borders swiftly.

The early adopters are tirelessly innovating and topping barriers, and a wave of “fast followers” are right behind them reading the pages of the newly inked “Work From Home” books being written across our agencies, organizations and enterprises worldwide.

Web collaboration platforms, tele and PC-presence, chat, teams, data sharing, VDI, DaaS, RDS, application publishing, server-based computing, clouds, hyperconverged infrastructure and more are all available right now to enable a completely new re-imagining of what your workforce could and perhaps should be.

For those organizations willing to re-imagine, there are a few logical steps you can take that are near fool-proof. I call it “cloud staging.”

Get a topological overview of what your current configuration looks like. Said another way, do an instant assessment to find out what your users have at their fingertips and, secondly, how they are using it. Like Google maps, know your starting position.
Look at the results of your assessment and realize that storage, applications, compute and networking do not need to be landlocked inside a PC from a big box store.
With your current work-from-home constraints, what applications are your users already using? There is a good chance they should be woven into your strategies. What new cloud services for data (Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox, AWS S3, etc.) and applications could you begin to use companywide?
The benefit of step-by-step cloud staging is that an organization can start small. Begin by backing up your data. Next, move on to replacing legacy applications with SaaS or cloud services. Most options are now just clicks away versus weeks of physical hardware delivery, configuration and deployment.
Fail fast. If designs fail, replace them. Do not stick to bad ideas just because we take a great deal of time making them.
Stay informed. The stream of consumable data on new ideas, new deployments and new architectures has never been more visible. There is no monopoly on good ideas in the modern workplace.

This is your opportunity to truly re-power your end user computing strategies. This is the real disruption of working from home.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By J. Tyler Rohrer

J. Tyler Rohrer co-founded Liquidware and leads Strategic Alliances, managing relationships with major platform and storage partners.

Sourced from Forbes

By Jonathan Greig

According to a Tessian survey, data protection concerns go out the window for remote employees.

A new report from cybersecurity firm Tessian found that the move to working from home has had drastic effects on how people approach data loss prevention.

In a survey of 1,000 people from the US and 1,000 from the UK, Tessian researchers found that 48% are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home and 84% of IT leaders surveyed said data loss prevention is more challenging when employees are working from home.

More than 90% of IT leaders trust their staff to follow best security practices when working from home yet 52% of employees (52%) believe they can get away with riskier behaviour when telecommuting, creating a dangerous situation for companies in sensitive industries.

“Businesses have adapted quickly to the abrupt shift to remote working. The challenge they now face is protecting data from risky employee behaviors as working from home becomes the norm,” said Tim Sadler, CEO and co-founder of Tessian. “Human error is the biggest threat to companies’ data security, and IT teams lack true visibility of the threat.”

The report goes into detail about why employees take more chances when working from home and the differences between employees based on age or location.

US employees are more than twice as likely as UK workers to send emails to the wrong person and are twice as likely to send company data to their personal email accounts than their UK counterparts. One-third of all employees surveyed take company documents with them when they leave a job, with US workers twice as likely as UK workers to do so.

When asked why they put their company and its data at risk, employees gave a variety of answers, with half saying “not being watched by IT” was their main reason for not following safe data practices. Another 47% said distractions at home caused them to take more chances and 51% say security policies impeded their productivity while 40% cited the pressure to get work done quickly as a reason. Of those surveyed, 54% said they would find workarounds if security policies stop them from doing their jobs.

A recent report on data breaches from Verizon found that 30% of breaches involve internal actors exposing company information as a result of negligent or malicious acts and the Tessian study confirms many of Verizon’s findings.

When broken down by organization size, more than half of those at organizations with at least 50 employees, 250 employees and 999 employees all say they are less likely to follow safe data practices.

Younger employees are also more likely to think they can get away with riskier data behaviour, according to the survey.

More than half of all employees have training every six months, but this statistic varied greatly based on the industry. The average for all industries was training every eight months, but companies involved in public services, energy, utilities, engineering, manufacturing, education, environment and agriculture all have training 10 months at a time or longer.

“As with most things related to cybersecurity, user awareness is a big deal and training programs are key, but a lot of organizations don’t have a follow up to training,” said former chief information security officer Allen Look in the survey.

“They don’t have a system in place to measure user compliance, performance, and success around protecting sensitive information. So what happens if they repeatedly fail? So we retrain them? There often aren’t clear consequences or avenues for remediation, which means nobody is actually held accountable when an incidence occurs.”

The priorities also varied between IT leaders and employees when it comes to the consequences of data loss. Employees were more focused on damaged reputation and losing their jobs while IT leaders were more concerned about losing customers, damaging consumer trust, breached information, and a hurt reputation.

The report includes a number of suggestions that included more training, more stringent company policies, and the adoption of automation or machine learning to help protect data.

“Business leaders need to address security cultures and adopt advanced solutions to prevent employees from making the costly mistakes that result in data breaches and non-compliance. It’s critical these solutions do not impede employees’ productivity though,” Sadler said. “We’ve shown that people will find workarounds if security gets in the way of them doing their jobs, so data loss prevention needs to be flexible if it’s going to be effective.”