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Navigating the Hybrid Work Challenge for Network Users

Destiny Bertucci
Auvik

The widespread shift to hybrid and remote work since the pandemic has complicated job responsibilities for network administrators who face complex new challenges to deliver dependable connectivity and security for their far-flung users. The 9-to-5 office weekday has already become a distant memory for most employees, replaced by a changing landscape that blends formal office workplaces with home offices, hotels, and neighborhood cafés.

To gain better industry context about how IT organizations are addressing these challenges, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and Auvik conducted a recent survey of more than 350 IT professionals who support the networking requirements of employees that work from home. From the research findings, it seems clear that most network operations teams are still struggling to solve this issue.

In Episode 2 of the MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA, discusses the network management impacts of remote work.


Virtually all IT organizations (96%) are already supporting hybrid workers, who now make up 30% of all employees. Based on these trendlines, nearly three-fourths of respondents (73%) reported an increase in their workloads following the shift from traditional work to hybrid work environments. These abrupt changes have created a tricky problem for IT teams because they no longer control all the network assets which employees need to access, but they still must provide a seamless user experience across all business operations. As a result, 87% of organizations have allocated budgets to update their network tools for remote and hybrid workers, but just 32% have reported being successful in their efforts.

These research findings reveal that the biggest barriers to the remote user experience include spotty service from home Wi-Fi setups, long physical distances from application servers, and poor quality from internet service providers. The two leading concerns for work-from-home employees involved their limited access to virtual private networks (VPNs) to establish digital connections between their computers and distant company servers, and recurring performance glitches with SaaS applications.

Rethinking Network Operations for Remote Troubleshooting

In this byzantine hybrid environment, most network automation tools are no longer adequate to perform the necessary steps for remote troubleshooting and remediation. More than three-fourths of organizations (76%) discovered a need to manage their network access policies across the patchwork of on-premises networks and remote users.

For all these reasons, 72% of organizations deployed network hardware to the homes of their remote staff. This included the installation of network security devices (63%) and improved Wi-Fi access points (54%). Furthermore, the increasing requirements to support hybrid office mobility caused 90% of organizations to upgrade their own internal Wi-Fi networks.

About half of all network operations teams (49%) also partnered with new tool vendors to help manage the network experience for remote workers. The most popular solutions included remote desktop access tools (81% of respondents), followed closely by endpoint monitoring tools (79%).

This sweeping move to a hybrid workforce is not just some lingering remnant from the pandemic – it is the undeniable future of work itself. The research findings indicate that network administrators and IT teams should take the time to do some self-reflection and understand their top priorities for overcoming these obstacles.

Businesses today must deliver the appropriate network tools and software to support their employees who choose to work from home, the office, or anywhere else for that matter. Making steady progress will require investments in secure solutions for remote network access, including integrated network security automation and centralized management consoles. By combining these important capabilities with modern observability tools, network admins can gain much greater visibility to monitor and manage network performance for the entire hybrid workforce, no matter where people are located. Navigating this ongoing challenge will require a steady hand on the wheel by IT leaders, but also an accurate roadmap to understand where they are coming from and where they still need to go.

Destiny Bertucci is Product Strategist at Auvik

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Navigating the Hybrid Work Challenge for Network Users

Destiny Bertucci
Auvik

The widespread shift to hybrid and remote work since the pandemic has complicated job responsibilities for network administrators who face complex new challenges to deliver dependable connectivity and security for their far-flung users. The 9-to-5 office weekday has already become a distant memory for most employees, replaced by a changing landscape that blends formal office workplaces with home offices, hotels, and neighborhood cafés.

To gain better industry context about how IT organizations are addressing these challenges, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and Auvik conducted a recent survey of more than 350 IT professionals who support the networking requirements of employees that work from home. From the research findings, it seems clear that most network operations teams are still struggling to solve this issue.

In Episode 2 of the MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA, discusses the network management impacts of remote work.


Virtually all IT organizations (96%) are already supporting hybrid workers, who now make up 30% of all employees. Based on these trendlines, nearly three-fourths of respondents (73%) reported an increase in their workloads following the shift from traditional work to hybrid work environments. These abrupt changes have created a tricky problem for IT teams because they no longer control all the network assets which employees need to access, but they still must provide a seamless user experience across all business operations. As a result, 87% of organizations have allocated budgets to update their network tools for remote and hybrid workers, but just 32% have reported being successful in their efforts.

These research findings reveal that the biggest barriers to the remote user experience include spotty service from home Wi-Fi setups, long physical distances from application servers, and poor quality from internet service providers. The two leading concerns for work-from-home employees involved their limited access to virtual private networks (VPNs) to establish digital connections between their computers and distant company servers, and recurring performance glitches with SaaS applications.

Rethinking Network Operations for Remote Troubleshooting

In this byzantine hybrid environment, most network automation tools are no longer adequate to perform the necessary steps for remote troubleshooting and remediation. More than three-fourths of organizations (76%) discovered a need to manage their network access policies across the patchwork of on-premises networks and remote users.

For all these reasons, 72% of organizations deployed network hardware to the homes of their remote staff. This included the installation of network security devices (63%) and improved Wi-Fi access points (54%). Furthermore, the increasing requirements to support hybrid office mobility caused 90% of organizations to upgrade their own internal Wi-Fi networks.

About half of all network operations teams (49%) also partnered with new tool vendors to help manage the network experience for remote workers. The most popular solutions included remote desktop access tools (81% of respondents), followed closely by endpoint monitoring tools (79%).

This sweeping move to a hybrid workforce is not just some lingering remnant from the pandemic – it is the undeniable future of work itself. The research findings indicate that network administrators and IT teams should take the time to do some self-reflection and understand their top priorities for overcoming these obstacles.

Businesses today must deliver the appropriate network tools and software to support their employees who choose to work from home, the office, or anywhere else for that matter. Making steady progress will require investments in secure solutions for remote network access, including integrated network security automation and centralized management consoles. By combining these important capabilities with modern observability tools, network admins can gain much greater visibility to monitor and manage network performance for the entire hybrid workforce, no matter where people are located. Navigating this ongoing challenge will require a steady hand on the wheel by IT leaders, but also an accurate roadmap to understand where they are coming from and where they still need to go.

Destiny Bertucci is Product Strategist at Auvik

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...