As WFH (Work From Home) becomes a permanent shift in the workforce, companies and small businesses are searching for ways to enhance network connectivity for their remote workers. If this paradigm shift in the workplace is here to stay, the home will have to become as connected as the office used to be.
One of the benefits of working at the office was having IT support on-hand to ensure tech worked seamlessly. The remote workforce can excel and thrive, but it will take enterprise-level quality and reliability of the network connectivity to give WFH a realistic shot at becoming a long-term option that works for both employees and companies. Dropped Zoom meetings or choppy robotic voice calls with prospective clients or existing customers are not tolerated at the office and the same standard now applies to home offices.
“One of the most important things that can be done to enable and empower employees working from home is to ensure they have reliable, consistent, powerful, resilient connectivity — the same level of network connectivity that they had in their pre-pandemic corporate office environments,” said RabbitRun Technologies CEO Eric Hernaez. “We believe affordable, fail-safe, and simple rapid installation networking solutions are critical to making work from home, work.”
Solutions aimed at solving networking challenges for small businesses that keep internet services running even during an outage are a key to WFH success. One solution, utilizing SOHO SD-WAN technology, is to have built-in failsafe backups, so the internet seamlessly jumps to a LTE wireless carrier without interruption and a home worker never loses service.
With new COVID variants leading to more companies delaying the shift back to offices and many making hybrid or full-time WFH the choice of their workers, it feels like WFH is inevitable.
To move to enterprise-level connectivity in your Small Office Home Office and ‘Make Work from Home, Work’, there are a few things to implement:
- An Advanced QoS solution that is application based and allows for dynamic operation. This way with a mix of office or home-office traffic like web-surfing, YouTube or Netflix, email, other business apps, your key apps like voice and video meetings always are prioritized and not interrupted.
- Failsafe, “no drop” Failover – This keeps customers failsafe with no dropped voice and video meetings. If the main internet connection drops out it seamlessly shifts to a backup broadband connection or to wireless LTE.
- Advanced Connection Load Balancing & Application Traffic Steering – With duel active Internet connections at the home office you can use some additional and advanced functionality. Advanced load balancing will utilize the maximum network connectivity while providing the best application performance. Application Traffic steering allows predictable user experience by directing specific traffic over the desired Internet connections, for example voice traffic could be directed to the best of the two Internet connections.
- Simplified Remote User Installation & Enhanced Remote Support – Simplified installation, that’s fast and isn’t complicated. A Plug & play solution with enhanced remote management via the Cloud Portal reduces install and support time. Support techs can jump over the Internet connection and access the router directly without disturbing the customer or getting remote PC access to troubleshoot a user complaint.
Improving remote support and having access and visibility on the home office (SD-WAN) router with the right on-device troubleshooting tools is key for the enterprise IT department to support their home users. Same goes for IT support companies that support a small business or even an individual entrepreneur. When you consider for example a site with 100 or 1000 employees, when sent home to work, the company would now have 100 or 1000 sites/locations/networks for the IT department to support. The deployment of affordable, easy-to-use and powerful solutions that mirror enterprise performance make it not only feasible, but in many cases, more efficient, cost-effective and practical to Work from Home.
No matter where the path of the virus takes us, WFH looks like it is here to stay. Seeking out products and services that make Work From Home, Work will be the key to the long-term success of WFH.
