Overcome Remote Working Challenges with Confidence: Discover the 8 Proven Tips and Solutions That Businesses Need | Article

With the rise of remote work, businesses have had to adapt to a new way of working. While there are many benefits to this style of work, there are also challenges that come with it. Remote work can present several difficulties, from staying focused and productive to maintaining communication and collaboration with team members. However, don’t worry! We have compiled a list of the best tips and solutions to help you overcome these challenges and succeed in remote work. Whether new to remote work or a seasoned pro, these tips help you work more effectively, stay organized, and achieve your goals.

Core Story – “Remote Work Revolution: The Future of Work is Here

Remote working has become a popular trend in recent years due to technological advancements and the increasing need for flexibility in the workplace. Working from anywhere with an internet connection has proven beneficial for employees and employers.

For employees, remote working offers the opportunity to create a more flexible schedule and eliminate the time and cost of commuting. This can increase job satisfaction, work-life balance, and productivity. In addition, studies have shown that remote workers often work longer hours and take fewer breaks than those in a traditional office setting, as the lack of distractions and the ability to work in a familiar and comfortable environment can enhance focus and motivation.

For companies, remote working can significantly save costs, particularly in office space. With employees working from home, renting or maintaining a physical office is unnecessary, reducing overhead costs and freeing up valuable resources. Additionally, remote working can increase employee retention, as employees are more likely to stay with a company that offers flexible working arrangements.

Remote working also provides companies access to a broader talent pool, as they are no longer restricted to hiring employees in the same geographic area. This can lead to increased diversity and a more innovative and dynamic workforce.

In conclusion, remote working offers many benefits for both employees and employers. Moreover, providing increased efficiency and cost savings have become an increasingly popular trend that will continue to grow in the coming years.

Some interesting facts and statistics about Remote Working worldwide:

1. The number of remote workers worldwide is on the rise. According to a study by Global Workplace Analytics, remote work has grown by 140% since 2005, and it is projected to grow by an additional 96% by 2028.
2. Remote workers are more productive than their office-based counterparts. According to a study by Buffer, remote workers are 35-40% more effective than their office-based counterparts.
3. Remote work can result in significant cost savings for both employees and employers. For example, a study by FlexJobs found that remote workers save an average of $4,000 per year on commuting and other work-related expenses. Additionally, companies save an average of $11,000 annually for every remote worker they employ due to reduced overhead costs.
4. Remote work is becoming more popular across all industries. A study by Remote. Co found that remote work is becoming increasingly popular across all sectors, with technology and finance leading.
5. Remote workers are often happier and have a better work-life balance. According to a study by Buffer, remote workers are 25% more satisfied with their jobs and have a better work-life balance than their office-based counterparts.
6. Remote work is widespread across all generations. A study by FlexJobs found that it is favoured by all ages, with Millennials being the largest group of remote workers.
7. Remote workers are often more engaged and motivated. A study by Harvard Business Review found that remote workers are often more involved and motivated than their office-based counterparts due to increased autonomy and the ability to work in a familiar and comfortable environment.

These statistics show that remote working is becoming an increasingly popular trend and offers many benefits for employees and employers.

‘The Benefits of Remote Work: Increased Productivity, Better Work-Life Balance, and Cost Savings’

How can Secure Access for Remote and Mobile workers be boosted by mixing VPN and SD-WAN Solutions? Many Enterprises handle growing distributed workloads for a remote workforce. We will look into Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), a new security architecture and solutions from a growing portfolio of products and vendors that promise a blend of Networking and Security technologies and Cloud-Based Services.

The financial and banking sectors face many challenges for a remote workforce; we will use this industry as an example; however, any organisation can adopt this model, no matter how big or small it is.

Top 8x Questions and Answers on how to resolve any issues, challenges, or concerns in the organisation to integrate the remote Workforce:

1. A large number of people access company digital resources.

In the past, 10 – 20% of people worked remotely on a business trip, and now 80 – 90%. With such enormous demands driven by COVID-19, how can we cope with those requirements? The focus is on the efficiency of Entry Points and Security measures through which traffic must traverse, be verified, and End-Users authenticated.

• Authentication is a significant factor in Remote Access, and we strongly advise using MFA or 2FA; what does it do? Knowledge is something the user and only the user know. Possession is something the user and only the user have; Inherence is something the user and only the user are. This will ensure the integrity of the end users, and only your organisation’s users will be allowed through no one else. Microsoft studies show that (MFA) for their accounts will block 99.999% of automated attacks.
  This can be achieved with minimal investments, as all users have smartphones. However, some integration with Active Directory and Edge VPN concentrator is needed to attain bulletproof Secure Authentication within the organisation.
  (Please check our post on MFA)
• Bandwidth is a crucial aspect of an Enterprise business. However, there are probably 12x or more Extranet entry points for VPN Client authentication. Now, dedicated circuits to the Internet are reasonably priced and offer ample bandwidth. So please check with your usual ISP to upgrade the existing bandwidth on those uplinks. After all, you can have 1Gb fibre-optic broadband at home for $20/month.
  This problem needs to be addressed quickly. It provides a bad user experience and delays work objectives, which will ultimately affect your clients.
• Firewalls and Next-Gen Firewalls can filter traffic on Source and Destination IP addresses and ports and permit or deny traffic pending to which group the user belongs. This can achieve very granular filtering. Users are granted access only to the services they need. It can be extended and integrated with other services in the company to provide another layer of security.
  (Please check our post on Next-Gen Firewalls)
• VPN Client provides an encrypted tunnel between the end-point (user device) and the Data Center and routes to applications and services. Again, VPN Clients, Next-Gen Firewalls, and VPN Concentrators are part of the bigger picture, where only selected routes can be given to a user pending their access role. For example, HR users should not have access to roads and the IT management platform.
• Cloud many Financial and Banking institutions already have private circuits connected to Cloud services, whether AWS, Google or Azure. Leverage these connections to your advantage. For example, VMware offers a SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) service with built-in SD-WAN.
• Network Automation – Facing complex network changes to adapt to your remote Workforce, we need to take the network initiative. Having a Network Automation solution helps enterprises easily cope with network changes. The graphical, full-process planning tool can deploy small-scale wired and wireless networks within 10 minutes.
  (Note: Network Automation shouldn’t be here, as enterprises with full network automation deployed have LAN bandwidth of 40 – 100Gb or more with 10Gb redundant uplinks to the Internet and Cloud. We have included ‘Network Automation’ proving that we also looked into this technology)

End-Users must use an encrypted connection that can be authenticated and ensure that legitimate users only have access to the services they need. This can be controlled by the firewalls and other services within your organisation: groups, routing, and access lists. As in Japanese castles, there are several layers, so nothing is open to the World. A good network design, leveraging in-house hardware and perhaps making changes when needed should achieve the above points in this section.

‘The Advantages of Remote Work: From Increased Productivity to Better Health and Happiness’

2. Security of Data access: all servers, services, and applications cannot be open to the World

Company digital assets mustn’t be ever open to the World. They must be a closely guarded secret. Within any data network, working environment applications and services are segregated, isolated into different blocks and layers, if you like. If we take a straightforward scenario—an end-user at home wants to access a document from a company SharePoint server—what layer of networking devices in a typical setup will user traffic traverse?

1. At home, the user has a fast connection to the Internet and initiates a VPN connection to the corporate network. The entire session between the user device and the VPN Concentrator in the Data Center is now encrypted. The edge router only permits IPSec traffic from the Internet and nothing else, which is the first layer of filtering.
As mentioned in Point 1, the user must likely be authenticated using the MFA method to establish a Secure VPN Tunnel.

2. Traffic at VPN Concentrator is decrypted within the corporate network and sent to Extranet Next-Gen Firewall for further strict inspection: ACL, User-Group ACL, IPS. In this layer, the Extranet Firewall filtering must be most granular; companies are often tempted to ‘relax’ the rule base, which is a colossal mistake. The first line of defence should be solid

3. Due to the user’s policies, traffic can be routed to the LAN firewall for further inspection. At this layer, it is prevalent to have IPS and other arrays of security tools inspecting and monitoring traffic

4. User traffic being load-balanced to the end server. The reverse process will happen from End-Server to End-Remote-User.

Typical Remote Access VPN, which can be configured as Active/Active or Active/Standby

3. Remote Systems administration and access to systems, threats, user integrity

System Administration

In any Large Enterprise organisation, Management Block and Out-of-Band Management are environments designed for this purpose. Regarding servers, ILO, RSC, and KVM connections manage server-farm infrastructure. Usually, administrators connect to servers from designated Bastions or Jump servers, which are allowed via LAN firewalls. Now, we face that administrators are frequently forced to work remotely; this facility can be easily extended to VPN solutions as described in Point 1 above.

Threats and User Integrity

Users are issued corporate laptops, built to company specifications with antivirus and a system to update operating system patches and software vulnerabilities. In addition, many organisations use Network Admission Control (NAC) systems that check user devices before they connect to the corporate network, whether via LAN or VPN connection. If any criteria are not met, the user is forced to update it. These procedures ensure that only ‘healthy’ machines are admitted to the network.

Please read more about NAC in our post.

We have mentioned quite a lot about user integrity in Point 1—Multi-Factor Authentication is one of the best methods to check End-User Integrity.

‘The Power of Remote Work: How to Stay Connected, Collaborate, and Succeed in a Virtual Environment’

4. Adaptation of existing systems to remote service and use. Not all the systems are equal, and access is allowed in the same way

Every company is different and has many other habits, usually driven by their sector. For instance, an accounting company will require separate remote access to a media company that needs to sift GigaBytes of data. What works for some doesn’t mean it has to work for others.

Remote Desktop Connection (TCP 3389s) is not a good idea. This method has compromised many systems, resulting in a bad user experience.
We wanted to emphasise that most communication occurs between databases, applications, and services within your organisation. Therefore, an excellent odd VPN Client connection or WebVPN should give you full and secure access to your resources instead of using old-fashioned methods. We will learn more about me below in Point 5 – Bandwidth.

5. Bandwidth, connection efficiency and the problem with access to a large amount of data remotely

Many companies complain about bandwidth for a remote workforce; let’s look at those points individually.y

Home – if you know that you will spend most of your time working remotely from home, now is the chance to invest in a good ISP that provides a fast connection. Many people switched to fibre-optic broadband. Remember that in highly populated areas, you are not the only one working remotely; in COVID-19, children are connected to schools. Talk to your ISP and upgrade your service.

As mentioned in Point 1, Data Centers should have many scalable access points for remote access. In addition, the company should upgrade the bandwidth or add more connections if the problem persists. In an enterprise environment, there are usually more than 12x around the World.
We would also like to explain that in the current era, data stays in the Data Cente; statistics show that 70% of data is being moved only inside the Data Center.

Application: The company should invest in thin clients instead of old-fashioned ‘fat applications’ that absorb a lot of bandwidth.

Cloud – leverage the Cloud connectivity instead of copying 2Gb directly over the VPN to the company server, upload to a secure location in the Cloud, and leverage the existing hybrid connection between your company and the Cloud.

SDWAN – This solution was designed with branch offices or locations in minutes; however, users often acquire it from home. Not only gives you a secure connection to your corporate network at the same time, but you also have a reliable uplink to the Cloud, like Office365, and an array of other applications.

6. Efficiency and effectiveness of Web Meetings, communication problems, and connection quality. User environment from which meeting is conducted

Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Huawei IdeaHub are Cloud-based solutions that deliver a secure connection to the End User and minimise latency (delay). If you are still encountering Collaboration problems, it is an excellent time to change your partner.

Cloud-based Solutions are very scalable and adapt to users’ demands. By connecting from home to a Cloud Collaboration service, you bypass potential bottlenecks in your organisations and save them bandwidth. In the past, all connections went via the Data Center. Thanks to new technologies like SDWAN, traffic is secured in either connectivity.

‘Say Yes to Remote Work: Unlocking the Benefits of Flexibility, Autonomy, and Work-Life Balance’

7. Involvement and motivation of employees in remote working

At first, adjusting for some may not be easy, and there is always to the side of the story. Clear communication within the company and addressing problems can ensure the right working environment. Below there are some best practices for managing a remote team:

• Give employees a sense of belonging
• Define goals for remote workers
• Improve your overall internal communication strategy.
• Communicate frequently and be pro-active
• Make Collaboration more efficient
• Foster a growth mindset
• Leverage technology
• Ensure that home users have the right working environment, and they should take 5 min breaks every 45-50 minutes. In the office, we are naturally distracted by other people
• Comfortable furnishing and good lighting. It might be a good idea to take the office chair or desk.
• Have an informal, casual web meeting between colleagues on Friday afternoons

8. Legal Regulation for Remote Work

Your company’s HR and Legal department should have a clear directive on the remote work situation and advise you accordingly.

Summary

There is quite a lot to take; we believe the most pressing challenges should be tackled first. However, evolution is better than revolution; good planning and design are proven to deliver successful changes. Many of the critical items we discussed are taken from our experience; we have deployed them and know they work.
The security of your corporate network is one of the most important things; don’t compromise it by implementing quick, not entirely understandable changes.

‘Remote Work: The Key to Unlocking Your Potential and Thriving in the 21st Century’

REMOTE WORKING | Flexibility | Increased Productivity | Better work-life balance | Cost Savings | Improved Health and Happiness | Reduced Computing time and Expenses | Autonomy | Increased Engagement and Motivation | Access to Wider Pool of Talent | Improved Job Satisfaction

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Lucja Czarnecka

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