This is a guest blog post by Sebastian Prat, Founder & CEO at Flexxible IT.

In recent times the world has seen business-disruptive events, but the COVID-19 global pandemic presents practically every organization with unprecedented and immediate challenges. For many, the ability to cope and navigate through these uncharted waters will likely depend on either adapting their operating model or scaling existing systems to support increased remote work.

Whether your organization is one that has embraced remote work or is averse to it, the new reality is that, like it or not, remote work is now probably part of your day-to-day business operations. Until now, for some, it has been a competitive advantage that attracts the best talent through enhanced work/life balance, that improves employee retention, and that optimizes real estate needs. For many more, it is critical to keeping the business going when disruption strikes.

For organizations that have been averse to the idea, perhaps this is a pivotal opportunity to reconsider. Assuming that our present situation or some form of it is now the norm, embracing remote work to address the immediate challenge may also provide the opportunity to set the business on a path to improving its competitive advantage.

The Key to Effective Remote Work

For any organization there are many considerations when implementing remote work, and they generally fall into two broad categories: team management and IT systems support.

Having clear and established guidelines for employees and their managers is central to effective remote work. In times of crisis, particularly when circumstances rapidly evolve, remote work policies may not be clearly established, and business operations are likely to be temporarily impacted. There are many useful resources out there from management consultants and research organizations that provide essential guidance on effective remote work. However, our focus is on IT and providing digital workspace continuity and delivering existing and familiar desktop and app environments to employees wherever they are working. This is where IT can have the greatest impact on keeping the business going.

Remote Work Considerations

Organizations that already have remote work capabilities in place are at a considerable advantage. Nevertheless, every organization’s ability to deliver is likely to be impeded without ample and experienced IT resources, critical systems and usage intelligence, and the ability to quickly scale. Getting this in place after crisis strikes can cost valuable time.

The key here is the delivery of the services users are familiar with. A remote working solution must extend what users already use — for example, moving to alternative online applications that require relearning is simply going to add complexity and disruption. Similarly implementing a VPN so users can use applications and access data from home is going to require IT intervention, resulting in increased support overhead and the security risks of data being stored on unauthorized and insecure devices.

As we have said, requiring workers to adapt to anything significantly new to accommodate remote work is too disruptive; their focus should be on trying to run the business as usual (as it can be) albeit from a new workplace. Understanding which apps — desktop, web, or microapps — are in use and their importance is imperative to keeping operations running as smoothly as possible. There will be apps that are obviously critical, some that will not be important to supporting core business operations, and some you may not have ever realized exist yet play a key supporting role.

Virtualizing users’ desktop and application environments is by far the most effective and scalable solution, enabling employees to work anywhere on devices that are available to them without the need for reconfiguration or intervention from the IT department. Solutions from Citrix offer this with the security and anywhere access to data from the same desktop and apps employees are used to.

Whether you already have Citrix in place or are in the process of implementation, it’s likely that you will need to quickly scale to cope with increased demand. When sudden spikes in remote work demands arise like we are experiencing, it’s the simplification and automation of repeatable processes in the delivery of infrastructure that will enable rapid scaling. Understanding which applications are critical to operations and having extensive intelligence to guide deployment requirements with a mechanism for their rapid delivery will keep critical business operations functioning.

It’s at times like this, when infrastructure, skilled IT people, and resources are stretched to capacity, that we learn how resilient our systems are. While we rise to these challenges, many of which will stretch the best IT departments to their limits, it is also a good time to understand how systems and infrastructure can be made more resilient.

For More Information

For the past decade Flexxible IT has specialized in and developed SmartWorkspaces, a technology that simplifies deployment and management of Citrix Workspace infrastructure. Flexxible IT is a Citrix Ready leadership partner. Check out the Citrix Ready Marketplace for more information.

Review the remote working solution overview from Citrix and Flexxible IT.