Adjusting your IT strategy to support a hybrid workforce

Despite back-to-office strategies, it is clear that some level of hybrid working is here to stay. To adapt to this change, businesses needed to shift the way they think about IT. While organizations have traditionally developed IT strategies to meet the demands of the business, this environment requires businesses to focus on addressing the needs of geographically dispersed workers on a large scale. 

Remote employees need to work as efficiently and effectively as they do when in the office. This requires access to the necessary applications and data without sacrificing speed, security, or reliability. To support this, businesses need to architect and execute IT strategies that incorporate more remote, nontraditional markets into their existing ecosystems. This challenge is best met with a hybrid IT solution that allows organizations to closely and cost-effectively match specific workloads to the best deployment models—whether on-premise, cloud, or colocation. This offers businesses the flexibility to get exactly what they need, where they need it, with the necessary performance, control, security, and compliance to accommodate the needs of their decentralized workforces. 

To effectively build a hybrid IT architecture that meets these requirements, businesses should now be focused on three key factors that impact the productivity and collaboration of remote and hybrid users:

The edge strategy

To support the influx of employees outside of traditional corporate hubs, businesses need an edge strategy to place applications and data closer to end users. Utilizing strategically located data centers, organizations can create pods of infrastructure to minimize latency and strengthen productivity while attracting and retaining the best talent wherever they are. 

Connectivity

As businesses integrate edge deployments and cloud solutions into their IT architectures, they need to securely and reliably connect these diverse infrastructures and link them back to the enterprise core. Additionally, with remote workers connecting via home internet services, the security behind this connectivity is more critical than ever.  

Virtual technologies

Virtual technologies such as desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) also help businesses support remote employees. DaaS virtualizes the desktop environment, providing users with the applications and data they need from any location and device. With DaaS, IT teams can centrally manage the desktop environment to rapidly provision and de-provision desktop access, update or change the desktop image, onboard new employees, troubleshoot employee workspaces, and perform security updates and patches from a centralized server with a click of a button. This unified management also heightens visibility and control over the desktop environment to improve the corporate security posture. 

The integration of edge strategies, cloud computing, and virtual solutions to support the distributed workforce continues to be critical for survival, bolstering the value of a hybrid IT strategy. While hybrid IT provides the needed flexibility and control, it can also create a vendor sprawl as the varied solutions likely do not sit in one place or with one provider. This complicates the management of the IT solution, forcing businesses to pay multiple bills, stitch together their own network between disparate environments, make multiple service and support calls, and manage multiple relationships with varied levels of service.  

Flexential can solve this issue by providing a full suite of technology capabilities—from colocation and cloud to connectivity and managed services—with a single partner. We help businesses navigate complex IT issues, offering best practices and lessons learned from years of experience devising and executing personalized hybrid IT environments at scale.  

With our suite of geographically dispersed data centers, Flexential can provide strategic colocation and cloud deployments to suit production, disaster recovery, and edge strategies. The Flexential private 100 Gbps network backbone securely and reliably interconnects our fleet of data centers and provides access to carrier hotels, hyperscale cloud providers, and the public internet to support distributed architectures. The built-in redundancy and consistent management and monitoring of the network further ensure uninterrupted access and peak performance. Businesses can also use our DaaS capabilities to virtualize, manage, and secure the desktop environment.  

Looking ahead, a hybrid IT infrastructure provides a flexible path for organizations to choose the specific deployment models and locations to support the organization, its distributed workforce, and any other changes the future holds.