Whether your employees have gone fully remote or work from home a day or two a week, your IT infrastructure needs to be ready. Buffering, lags, and downtime create unhappy employees. These issues also result in lost productivity, decreased revenues, and over-reliance on cloud based disaster recovery.
Thankfully, with the tips below, you’ll be six steps closer to providing reliable and up-to-date IT for your employees, regardless of where they work!
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Design & Implement an Action Plan
Each part of your company’s IT infrastructure, including third-party services, suffers from performance strain at one point in the workday or another. If the pressure leads to an interruption or full-blown crash, business productivity may come to a halt.
An action plan should focus on business continuity in these situations and minimizing any impacts. It’s recommended to periodically review your IT action plans to make sure they’re up-to-date with business and employee needs.
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Know What Tools Your Team Needs Remotely
Most businesses rely on communication channels and services to operate in a remote environment. Whether it’s through video conferencing, instant messaging, or email, your IT infrastructure should prioritize critical business operations.
Help your team take steps to guarantee uptime for these tools by creating an ongoing action plan. Just remember that the ideal tools may change as business needs ebb and flow, necessitating new prioritizations.
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Monitor Bandwidths Across Your Tech Stack
Depending on your business location and industry, your IT infrastructure may reach high bandwidth use at different times per day. Also, bandwidth usage may decrease during certain times of the year, depending on the business, such as holiday shutdowns.
Monitoring the allocation and utilization across your company’s tech stack should tell you when services need the most bandwidth. It can also help you adjust for these trends, such as allocating more bandwidth in the mornings when most employees are online.
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Check Reliability with Service Testing
Whenever you’re introducing a new service or upgrading an existing one, it’s important to test for reliability. Remote employees depend on – and expect – the services to work as needed. So determine a baseline for reliability, then test the stated requirements. Being able to catch and remedy issues before and soon after the service rolls out can reduce operational interruptions. Regularly review the testing schedule and increase it if problems persist.
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Ensure Support Is Available Across Time Zones
Your team will need technical support during business hours, but those hours may stretch across multiple time zones. As employees log in for the day, possible issues may arise, and your IT support team may be needed.
Accessible how-to guides can provide self-help to remote employees while reducing the need for on-call support. Still, you must plan for in-house and third-party support if employees cannot resolve an issue with self-help instruments.
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Give Remote Employees Decentralized Access with Managed VPNs
Many portals or tools, such as intranets, require a VPN for access. If a VPN is lagging or offline, your IT team will have a difficult time fixing the issue for waiting employees. Stay ahead of VPN issues by observing its use and access times. You should also log historical data that may point out trends. Make adjustments as necessary to ensure all remote employees have adequate access and bandwidth.
Business across all industries has changed, including the demands placed on IT infrastructures. Employees need support across time zones and quick resolutions to issues within your company’s technology stack. Regardless of these differences, one thing remains the same: a proactive approach by your IT team is the best remedy when issues arise.
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