The impact of COVID-19 has put immense pressure on political systems, our economies, and our social lives. It has hit us hard and has forced rapid change. To flatten the curve, social distancing has led governments and companies to recommend or require working from home. Remote work mandates have had an immediate impact on IT infrastructure. All of a sudden, employees are accessing apps and data differently, turning many organizations’ IT infrastructure upside down. IT environments face new stressors, and our “new normal” will inevitably reveal room for improvement in current infrastructure architectures.

Organizations have addressed many short-term challenges by scaling up their environments quickly. After all, the top priority has been to get users working remotely as soon as possible. But just because your employees now have remote access to the resources they need doesn’t mean you’re done. You should start assessing your entire environment to understand the impact a larger contingency of remote workers will have on your organization. It’s essential to create short- and long-term strategies to ensure this new normal is sustainable.

The good news? The technology to enable a successful transition is already available. In this post, I’ll look at potential long-term impacts of the shift to remote work and how modernizing your environment now, in the midst of a crisis, could help you to address them.

Business Continuity

One key learning so far is that it’s critical to act fast. In the future, especially in the near term, we’ll see governments and companies act quicker in issuing remote-work directives to minimize disruptions and pauses in operations. The key goal at many organizations will be to transition as fast as possible.

This means your environment must be business continuity ready, with no lead time. I expect to see more environments where the infrastructure can run two modes — “office” and “remote” — with the same setup. The most effective way to accomplish this is to build your environment based on a remote model. Here, the requirements and access methods for your remote and office endpoints are identical. The beauty of this? A remote approach typically provides additional security controls, making your environment even safer.

Aligning your environment for remote work also ensures that the transition from office to remote will have no impact on the user and IT operations. When you take an active-passive approach, where your everyday environment isn’t remote-work ready, you’ll need to take your passive parts live first and cross your fingers that everything will work as planned.

Let me give you an example of a success story I’ve seen recently. One of our customers, with a workforce of more than 100,000, is providing desktops and apps via Citrix to all employees. The only change required was to add Citrix Gateway appliances so they had enough capacity to enable secure access to desktops and apps. The result? They transitioned with no lead time, no effects on user experience, and no additional operational efforts.

Employee Experience and Employee Productivity

Remote work certainly isn’t a new concept, but many people are experiencing it for the first time. Even those who’ve worked from home a few days per week in the past find long-term remote work different (check out these remote work tips and tricks from my colleague Martin Zugec).

Using your own equipment (e.g. monitor), in your own “office,” with fewer social contacts sometimes might not be as comfortable as being at work. And if the enterprise application isn’t responding like normal, the frustration level can be quite high. Already a top priority for many organizations, employee experience will get additional attention. If your remote workers experience slow, unreliable environments, solution adoption will be low. And if that’s their experience now, don’t expect employees to want to work remotely after the current crisis passes. Remember, unhappy employees tend to be less engaged or even actively disengaged (learn more about treating your employees like customers to improve employee engagement).

Poor employee engagement can have a direct impact on employee productivity. Because we live in a world driven by performance metrics, increasing efficiency and productivity will always remain a top priority at every company. After all, it’s a key factor for growth. Maintaining (or even exceeding) the level of productivity achieved in the office after a transition to remote work requires that the employee experience is consistent, no matter the circumstances or where employees are doing their jobs. A solution like Citrix Workspace with intelligent capabilities can help to improve the employee experience (and, in turn, productivity) by organizing, guiding, and automating work. And approaches like Design Thinking can help organizations develop human-centered innovations to deliver the best possible employee experience for remote workers.

Security

In the past, most employees accessed the resources they needed from an internal network. Remote work has changed that. Now, the majority of your data is transmitted from many different places to your data center. The vast amount of communication and much of your data are no longer confined within your network perimeter.

At a conference earlier this year, I said that zero trust will be among the hottest topics in 2020 and 2021. With the shift to remote work, I’m even more convinced. Zero-trust principles such as never trust, always verify, just-in-time access, and just-enough-access likely will be core to many organizations’ security approaches and will help to minimize exposure.

With Citrix Workspace, you can achieve zero trust with no extra effort and:

  • Manage your authentication centrally and provide single-sign-on to all apps, as well as use a variety of authentication methods to fulfill your internal and external security requirements.
  • Control the data by hardening traditional apps through Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops or Microsoft policies and protect your web app content with Citrix Secure Workspace Access.
  • Streamline network traffic to further reduce your organization’s footprint and exposure. This differs from traditional client-server environments that use VPN, where all communication ports have to be open to the backend-servers.
  • Leverage Citrix Analytics for Security, which applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver actionable insights on user behaviors that enable Citrix admins to proactively address user and application security threats.

Hybrid-Multi-Cloud

The transition to a cloud-service model has made it easier for many companies to scale as needed, and cloud vendors have seen a significant increase in usage. Yes, organizations could purchase hardware resources for their data center to satisfy increased demand. But you have to ask, how long will it take for the equipment to arrive? And once the crisis passes, what happens to the spare hardware? Scaling down isn’t that easy on premises. A multi-cloud approach, across several regions, will be considered more oftent in the future to help to reduce dependency on a single provider and a single location.

In our case, customers have leveraged Citrix Cloud-based solutions such as Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service or Citrix Gateway service to scale up and to onboard additional remote users quickly.

Remote work mandates have forced IT teams to expedite cloud initiatives that were already in progress and has led to increased adoption of these services. Cloud usage was increasing before COVID-19; now, the transition has sped up and will make cloud-based solutions the primary option sooner than expected.

Still, many organizations can’t transition to cloud due to regulatory constraints. Remote PC Access has proved to be the right solution for many companies willing to provide work-from-home capabilities but that don’t have the infrastructure ready to leverage these possibilities. Remote PC Access enables them to leverage their existing hardware resources to support remote work and, in turn, reduce costs and the reliance on third parties to enable remote work capabilities.

Big thanks to my colleagues Jan-Christopher Gärtner, PO Johansson, and Jon Cook for the inspiration, and thank you for reading. Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter, and please leave your thoughts in the comments below.