What’s next for your currently functioning remote teams?

April 03, 2020

Remote work has been discussed for many years, but organizations, without any urgency, are slow to adopt due to inertia of sticking with legacy systems. In the past 2 - 3 months, many organizations have had no choice but to move swiftly to scale up or set up remote teams across the organization to cope with the disastrous impact caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, which wasn’t expected to be happening in 2019. The few-year-old contingency plans didn’t fit the situation; the systems weren’t designed for it; the technology might not be up-to-date or as scalable to match the unprecedented needs. IT teams drafted and executed the plan, bought whatever hardwares they could get, negotiated for any still-accessible vendor support, and compromised along the process when resources weren’t readily available, in a week's time. Organizations were definitely pushing their limits.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

It’s tough, we know. Here’s the good news - organizations that went through the chaos of the ad hoc remote work setup had made the hardest first step to the enabling of a sustainable, scalable and secure remote work environment. In the long-run, performance, scalability, security and productivity are all that matter. After the catch-up game in the first quarter of 2020, it’s time to take a breath and assess whether the current solution is tackling the right problems or even more, and whether the current architecture is agile enough to scale up and down for the next year. Here are some considerable aspects:

Are there any limitations that forced a detour in the ad hoc setup?
Does the current remote work environment actually enable teams to at least maintain, or potentially boost their productivity?
Apart from already existing apps and tools, can the teams be able to add new apps or remove unuseful apps like they did before?
Does the solution work for both remote and in-office, which flattens the learning curve for existing and prospective employees?
How secure is this new mix of systems, technologies and hardwares?

A good example is the choice between public and private clouds. For an urgent fix, leveraging public cloud is probably a good choice because it enables a lot of capabilities instantly. However, the cost isn’t quite favorable when an organization tries to scale in the long run. The tradeoff between agility and cost never goes away, but this is an opportunity to map out a solution that makes both economic and technical sense to the organization.

At Resolve Technology, we apply the latest technology to build remote work environments that leverages heavily on automation. We will help you make sense of the technology challenge you’re facing, and sort out the most cost-effective solution that meets your organization’s needs.