Working remotely has possibly never been embraced by your business as you’ve historically adopted a bricks and mortar mindset. Moreover, you might even have deliberately hired local talent simply because you believe people are most productive when physically present.
The global pandemic has had a permanent impact on the way most businesses operate. Small and medium sized businesses have been forced to rethink what “business as usual” looks like. Social distancing and workplace restrictions introduced by government have placed a new emphasis on flexible working and the connection of a geographically dispersed workforce.
Businesses across the globe have been forced to embrace remote working. As a result, connectivity, communication and collaboration are more important than ever.
The new normal
While remote working has practiced since well before the pandemic, the possibility of it being the primary way of working was rarely explored by most organisations. The recent and dramatic move from a centralised workplace structure to decentralisation of businesses, almost overnight, has placed enormous pressure on businesses to keep employees connected and productive.
If your business never had to truly explore remote working during the pre-pandemic era, making the change will either have repositioned your operations dramatically or tipped things beyond the edge of survival into business lockdown.
Since the onset of the pandemic more businesses are exploring Microsoft solutions like Office 365 (for messaging, communication, and reporting), Teams (for meetings and collaboration), and OneDrive (for file sharing). However, whilst these applications provide access over a secure network, there’s no guarantee that the networks that employees themselves use to access privileged and sensitive company information at home are either fast enough or sufficiently secure. With the rise in remote work, companies have been forced to acknowledge the significant increase in their cybersecurity vulnerability.
Today, businesses are embracing secure business-grade connectivity solutions as a means of preserving the safety and integrity of their data and exploring the best ways to ensure that employees and customers can connect safely and securely over the internet as they interact and share. This can mean providing solutions that leverage SDWAN technology or providing secure internet services that employees can use at home.
Secure business communication and data sharing
Business Internet
Fast and reliable internet service is essential, not only for internal business communication and collaboration, but also for external communication with customers, vendors, suppliers, partners, regulatory/government agencies, and other stakeholders. But it’s likely the connections your staff are using to go digital is better suited to Netflix and Amazon Prime rather than video conferencing, and as your competitors smarten up, the last thing you want is an internet service that falls over in the middle of a critical client or investor meeting. That can discredit and disqualify you in an instant and destroy the hard work you’ve invested in generating that opportunity.
Distributed Enterprise
As COVID-19 forces working systems to evolve from monolithic work structures to remote partnering and collaborative team effort, offices and businesses need technology to keep up, connect remotely, retrieve, use, and send data non-stop to centrally managed data centres.
While organisational interconnectedness may be a feature of the modern world, building and managing a functional wide area network infrastructure still offers a number of challenges. An important aspect that businesses can maximize is a strategic investment in technology that will cost-effectively deliver the required performance, reliability, and simplicity.
Voice
Effective communication is a critical factor for business success when working remotely. In the pre-pandemic era, the need to stay up to speed and match the pace of modern work practices have rendered legacy telephone platforms obsolete. Cloud-based unified communication solutions like Microsoft Teams now offer a business optimised balance of secure voice, video, chat, document sharing, and more.
How can we help?
At Fuse, we’ve partnered with the best Service Providers in the market to bring you a portfolio of cost-effective, high-speed, business grade circuits which offer performance, resiliency, quality of service and availability.
We also provide a range of wired and wireless solutions ranging from fibre leased lines, and SD WAN to 5G mobile services.
As experts in modern workplace communications, Fuse offers businesses a range of voice solutions, from a fully hosted cloud voice platform to SIP trunks, in-dial number ranges, toll-free numbers, porting and minutes.
