Enterprise remote connectivity — are businesses ready for hybrid work?

Long after the release of all pandemic-related restrictions organizations continue to offer hybrid or fully remote working models. These changes really raised the need to offer remote workers timely support, and system access. So naturally, remote connectivity is among the big enterprise topics across industries today. In collaboration with Computing Research, TeamViewer has conducted a survey of 125 enterprise IT leaders to find out what exactly they think about the potential of remote connectivity in this new world of work.

Is Enabling Remote Workers a Bigger Challenge for Enterprise?

For companies of all sizes the pandemic meant a transition to a new world of work. And due to the mere scale of a typical enterprise business, they are facing particularly difficult challenges including managing a globally spread-out workforce and enabling employees across locations and borders to have the same level of access to systems and files.

Imagine an enterprise that once had all its employees working full-time at the office, moving to a model where every employee is offered two weekly home office days. Whereas this company may have had select functions or freelance workers that needed a certain level of remote access to their systems before, now all employees across all functions and roles need some kind of remote access and IT support.

This is a challenge when your employees are all based in the same country, in the same time zone, and share the same office with a one IT department.

It is a significantly greater challenge when you are a large enterprise with offices spread over multiple continents and have various systems, devices, and solutions. Added to this and depending on your industry, you might still be working with a relatively small IT team. Your challenge is not offering remote support to various systems, devices, and solutions, but trying to scale your business with the limited capacity of your IT team.

Unfortunately, the complexity of the matter does not end there. The very scale of your business is likely to make you more attractive to cyber criminals, who are looking for victims able to pay large ransomware sums or for the glory of being able to hack a big player. You need a solution that caters to the demands for hyper-efficiency, strong security, and high levels of compatibility – a bit of a miracle worker really. Because the hybrid and remote work models are here to stay.

A staggering 99 per cent of respondents report that their employees are either entirely remote (2 per cent) or hybrid (97 per cent). It thus comes as no surprise that 90 per cent of respondents agree that a sophisticated remote connectivity platform is essential in today’s increasingly hybrid economy. Despite this only around a third of the respondents report having fully deployed such a solution.

How Confident are Leaders in Their Remote Connectivity Solutions?

Any remote connectivity solution can only ever serve its business properly if it is coupled with strong security measures. In its nature, allowing people to access business sensitive data and valuable databases from remote locations demands airtight authentication processes, sound user role and group management, and detailed activity logging. At the same time, remote access needs to be something any desk-based worker in the company can use – regardless of their IT skill level. So how confident are IT leaders in their remote connectivity solutions?

The responses lean quite heavily in one direction and indicate that organizations are attempting to enable a modern workforce without taking the necessary IT steps to secure such environments.

Could IT leaders be leaving their organizations open to vulnerabilities in security posture?

Our full report unpacks how IT leaders’ confidence in remote connect solutions is impacting their organization and enterprise as whole.

Are Remote Work Models Pushing Enterprise to Move Beyond VPN?

Protecting the borders or a company system adequately was always a priority of the IT department of enterprises. However, with hybrid and remote work trending like never before, the topic of access management now should have the highest priority.

The most common and popular approach to securely accessing work remotely is reliant on VPNs, with 82 per cent  of computing survey respondents using them.

The pandemic triggered a surge in VPN usage due to the need to quickly establish remote working frameworks. For many, VPN usage enabled enterprises to rapidly get remote working initiatives going and to keep business running. So why consider alternatives?

Because VPNs have several drawbacks.

In our full report, we detail the risks to security and productivity that can be a byproduct of VPN usage.

Not all IT leaders are stuck on VPN though. Remote connectivity platforms are experiencing a surge as enterprises and companies of all sizes are realizing that they are simply better suited for the requirements of hybrid and remote work models.

For those respondents that have implemented a modern connectivity solution, the value is demonstrable. 1 in 3 rate the success of their solution as a perfect 10 out of 10, where 10 is ‘extremely successful’. The remaining respondents, 60 per cent, assess the success as at least 8 out of 10. The average score awarded by respondents, was 8.5 out of 10, evidencing clear widespread success.

Will Remote Connectivity Help Enterprises Overcome the IT Skill Gap?

Not all desk-based workers are highly IT savvy. Many are skilled in more creative fields, work with crunching numbers or excel in customer service. They might not have the faintest clue what to do if their work device malfunctions or understand the ramifications of ignoring a security patch for weeks on end. For this reason, IT departments need ways to support co-workers that do not assume any special knowledge on the part of the person requesting support.

73 per cent of the respondents agree it is difficult to attract and retain IT talent today, making fostering in-house skills and development all the more important. Providing a user-friendly workplace in which issues are resolved in a timely fashion and access to resources is seamless is therefore paramount.

We investigate how a remote system can support the goals of IT specialists and an organization as a whole in this downloadable report.