The recent global outbreak of Coronavirus promises to change the world forever and will have a profound impact on the way we work and live. As the crisis continues to grow in all geographies, the organizations are forced to provide flexible, remote working or work from home working options to their workforce to ensure that their productivity is not affected.
The data from Global Workplace Analytics says that the number of remote workers has increased by 140% since 2005, recording a 10% increase annually on average. This number doesn’t include self-employed workers like freelancers. The COVID-19 crisis will lead to an increase in the number of remote workers or telecommuters as the firms will enable working from home for its employees. Google, Twitter, JP Morgan, Facebook are just some of the global companies urging their employees to work from home.
While over the last few years, several firms have facilitated remote working, but this is likely to gather pace now with several geographies under lockdown, making office commute and travel almost impossible. With Coronavirus pandemic, the enterprises are left with little option but to allow their employees to work from home, so they continue to be productive.
The global Coronavirus pandemic might be the inflection point for remote working. Over the next few months, the number of enterprises wanting to enable remote working for their workforce is all set to surge. As humanity faces one of the toughest challenges, the pandemic will lead to a wider acceptance of remote working, flexi working, or work from home model of employees.
Why SD-WAN Is Essential For Enabling a Digital Workforce
The digital workforce requires highly reliable connectivity to maintain the same productivity level as a regular workplace. Typically, enterprises have two major reservations before allowing work from home to their workforce. The first is to ensure the safety and security of their company data. Secondly, the firms want to provide the capacity (depending on the job role) to the teleworkers with remote communications infrastructure.
The Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) technology is able to address both these concerns. SD-WAN enhances network security by encrypting the traffic. Further, the segmenting feature ensures that in case of a breach, the damage, if any, is minimized. Besides, it provides complete and real-time visibility into the amount and type of traffic. This enables them to respond quickly in case of a cyber attack, thus limiting the impact.
The agility and performance of SD-WAN are unmatched. SD-WAN routers can bring together the bandwidth of several WAN connections. Firms using SD-WANs can easily combine wireless and fixed-line connections, and bandwidths can be added or reduced depending on the situation. What is of significance during the Coronovirus situation is that SD-WAN allows fast deployment of WAN services in a remote site without the IT teams traveling to the location.
Enabling Remote Workforce With SD-WAN
Remote employees might need to use applications like videoconferencing and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). SD-WAN solutions can be configured to prioritize business-critical applications and then use the most effective path to deliver the same. This helps in bringing down latency and also packet loss, thus improving overall network performance.
Besides this, the technology approach comes with several other advantages that enhance the business efficiency and overall security of the infrastructure. SD-WAN uses the internet to create secure and high-performance connections. This way, it is able to deliver business applications in a cost-effective manner while enabling cloud-based services.
The companies which had already implemented SD-WAN are now finding it easier to offer work from home option to their employees quickly. Over the last few years, SD-WAN has emerged as an innovative networking approach that delivers superior performance with significant cost benefits.
Before SD-WAN emerged as a de facto solution for organizations to allow remote working, the enterprises had to make a significant investment to set up Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Wide Area Networks (WANs). The flexibility and agility offered by SD-WAN make it an easy decision.
The SD-WAN solution appeals to businesses to provide robust, resilient, and, most importantly, secure end-to-end deployment with greater end-user transparency. For the end-user, with SD-WAN, the experience is similar to working within the company network.
SD-WAN is a perfect solution for remote company access since template-based orchestrated policies can be easily and quickly applied for mobile connectivity. Further, it allows the filtering of policies that permits access to business applications without going through the headquarters and also releases the company’s data traffic. This way, SD-WAN is a win-win solution, and it benefits both the company and the employee.
Coronavirus outbreak might be the reason for driving remote working, but in the long run, it is sure to benefit the company, employees, and society. Enabling remote working will allow firms to retain quality talent and build loyalty even as they record significant savings on office space and infrastructure. On the other hand, it enables the employees to benefit from better work-life balance and society as a whole benefit with reduced pollution and traffic.
The SD-WAN technology’s ease of use, agile, flexible, cost-efficient, security features and ability to integrate with MPLS network will help them in providing a robust infrastructure to its employees while ensuring that their work and productivity is not impacted.
The organizations that plan to provide remote working to its workforce should consider using Lavelle Networks ScaleAOn SD-WAN solutions. Several top global brands in retail, e-commerce, insurance, healthcare, financial institutions, and manufacturing use Lavelle Networks SD-WAN Platform to better manage their network infrastructure while keeping their costs under control.
