Scott Gould, VP of Business Operations at Element Critical – Spiceworks News and Insights

Hybrid or remote work may have been born out of necessity, but the work model has made an indelible imprint and becomes part of the corporate culture. Scott Gould, VP of business operations at Element Critical, shares how enterprises can tackle the challenges and reap the benefits of a hybrid workforce.

According to Pew Research Center, 59% of employees work from home all or most of the time. As employees continue to assert their choice to work from home, remote work is yet another force that is concurrently pushing organizations to increase digital business transformation efforts.

Ladders CEO, Marc Cenedella, has suggested that this massive shift from office to remote work is Americas most significant societal change since the end of World War II. Whether businesses embrace the shift by going fully remote or balancing a hybrid model, the emerging extended enterprise offers an array of possibilities for employers and employees alike.

Businesses must overcome some challenges to leverage these benefits. Challenges can range from how to deliver both real-time and enriching interactions for geographically distributed employees to fostering IT security amid changing circumstances. Here are a few examples of obstacles businesses must address and the benefits they hope to achieve.

See More: Why Colocation Is the Best Bet for Reliable and Cost-Effective Data Storage

Just as remote work is expanding the workplace landscape, the IT infrastructure supporting businesses and employees has undergone concurrent transformational shifts. The former centralized computing strategy where businesses hosted their IT stack in a single location has also gone hybrid.

Since the dawn of digital business, organizations have needed a place to store data, applications, and computing. This IT infrastructure, referred to as a data center, can be housed onsite at the headquarters, in branch offices, hosted in a colocation data center, or in the cloud. In the past, many businesses were supported by a single IT compute/storage environment. Businesses now have IT resources spread across a variety of data center environments. Even companies implementing a cloud-only strategy at the onset of the pandemic are repatriating data or evolving into a hybrid cloud strategy.

Hybrid cloud strategies are defined by the simultaneous utilization of public clouds and colocation or on-premises data centers. Often, hybrid cloud strategies are pursued because they allow organizations to utilize the public clouds scalability while keeping highly sensitive data secure on a private network.

Alternatively, multi-cloud strategies are when an organization utilizes a combination of cloud providers which can be two or more public clouds, two or more private clouds (colocation or on-premises), or a combination of public, private, and edge clouds to distribute applications and services. This allows businesses to utilize the cloud services they need while leveraging the stability and durability of colocation to support foundational IT architectures.

IT leaders realize a cloud-only strategy is expensive and insufficient to meet all the needs of todays businesses. The rising tide of companies pulling workloads out of the cloud is motivated to do so for various reasons, including uptime concerns that affect brand protection, unsanctioned use of the public cloud, information security concerns, application lifecycle considerations, governance requirements, and data sovereignty.

Under a hybrid cloud solution, colocation data centers in key locations can offer the best environment to ensure high-quality connectivity between onsite/edge infrastructure and private and public clouds while addressing some of the top cloud computing challenges.

Highly connected colocation providers, with private network solutions and direct cloud connections, enable businesses to take advantage of what the cloud offers, such as speed and flexibility, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of greater uptime, resilience, control, and the additional security of the colocation data centers.

The new modern workplace requires bandwidth, security, and flexibility wherever employees and infrastructure reside. The bottom line is that building a workplace that meets employees connectivity and productivity requirements for real-time or asynchronous engagement ultimately means investing in digital technologies.

For some companies achieving these results may mean infusing native data center software & applications, including SaaS options, into their modern IT solution. Such adjustments will improve how employees work remotely, work internally, and deliver external services to the customer. Companies can also invest in tools to reduce security risks, such as adding two-factor authentication and encryption to devices, so confidential information is only available via virtual private networks and encrypted end-to-end systems.

For most companies, the bottom line is that having employees work outside the office goes beyond freeing up office space. This is just the first step toward the evolution of their IT strategy.

A remote business workforce built upon a Hybrid IT environment allows businesses to hire highly-skilled, technical leaders able to throttle their business solutions into high gear without being geographically limited to local-only staffing.

The pandemic certainly showed CIOs and IT leaders that modern business continuity requires IT departments and infrastructure built for adaptability. Emerging technology and connectivity tools can transform commerce and our lifestyles, even changing the paradigms of how and where we work. Yet they also need to be built upon increasingly connected data center architectures.

How are you ensuring that your IT infrastructure is adaptable and can support the demands of hybrid work? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Scott Gould, VP of Business Operations at Element Critical - Spiceworks News and Insights