Mena Migally, Regional Vice President, META at Riverbed, explains the barriers to remote working and how to overcome them.
The Riverbed Future of Work Global Survey paints a clear picture of where companies are, and where they intend to go and the technologies needed to get them there. Globally, businesses expect a nearly 50% increase in employees working remotely post COVID-19.
The biggest barriers to the success of a remote workforce in the Middle East, as uncovered by this survey, are training or manager support (43%), the need for software or technology to optimise or improve performance (40%) and the need for better visibility into network and application performance (37%).
Given these challenges, it follows logically that in an effort to drive greater remote working performance, UAE and Saudi business leaders have already begun to identify their priority strategies and technologies to enhance remote work for their employees and their company. The top initiatives these regional business decision makers plan to undertake through this year and the next include updating company-wide remote workplace strategies and policies (48%), deploying technology to automate remote network operations (47%), re-evaluating and/or re-architecting the IT environment (46%) and gaining better visibility of network and application performance (45%).
Given how rapidly and successfully organisations in the region have been able to adapt to the new normal, it’s no surprise that Middle East business leaders expect to gain long-term benefits for their employees and bottom line as a result of increasing their remote workforce, including: better work-life balance (56)%, increases in employee retention (48%), savings from office space and related costs (48%) and better use of technology (48%).
The rise of cloud-native
COVID-19, and the resultant geographical spread of employees, brought about a fair share of challenges for businesses operating on hybrid systems – a model combining on-premises and cloud infrastructure. The sprawling nature of the hybrid infrastructure meant IT teams were left with a complete lack of visibility into their network performance and employee activity. Subsequently, they were hit with a vast increase in performance issues.
By contrast to their hybrid counterparts, cloud-native businesses – which have their systems exclusively based in the cloud – found the transition to remote working far easier. With no on-premises infrastructure to grapple with, employees could work from home, much as they did from the office, with little-to-no impact on their ability to access the applications and files that they needed. As such, cloud-native businesses are inherently better at responding to uncertainty and change and we can expect businesses, especially in the SME space, to increasingly favour this IT paradigm.
Finally, tools that maximise the performance and reliability of apps and remote workers or that drive enhanced network visibility, regardless of location will be absolutely fundamental to high-functioning organisations in this new paradigm. This is an area Riverbed is very focused on with our customers – with solutions such as Client Accelerator, SaaS Accelerator and unified Network Performance Management. Together, our NPM and application acceleration technologies offer the most complete network visibility and performance solution to enable working from anywhere.