Are you as a leadership team planning out

1) Returning back to the office with some (but more than before) flexible working? 2) Not returning to the office and enabling home working for all? 3) Creating a 50/50 balance of office and remote working 4) Creating a “Work Anywhere” enabled workforce to empower your people with data anywhere?

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COVID-19 has had a massive impact on the world and changed the way interact with our teams to ensure we add value to you our customers, and this is hear to stay. Welcome to a world of “working anywhere”, where mobile working was once a minority practice. The reality is that it is now routine for millions of employees globally. Staff have had months of getting to grips with new digital technologies at home. It is therefore definitely time to welcome it and understand the benefits and changes required by the business and its systems. We are seeing a rise in conversations around: > Should we return to the office? which office? what does this now need to look like?  > Do we need to protect our business of another outbreak/lockdown? we were caught out last time and we cannot financially sustain an unplanned similar event again.

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Are there REALLY BENEFITS TO WORKING FROM HOME (work Anywhere) enablement? Yes! A recent study conducted by Finder showed that 65% of workers said they were likely to be more productive working at home. A massive 85% of those surveyed didn’t feel that they needed to be in an office to work productively. Two-thirds of employers also reported increased productivity for remote workers compared to those in the office.

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1 – Managing field/home-based workstation standard daily task We need to ensure the company machine is managed effectively no matter where it lives. This was a fairly well-established practice to manage when all machines were under one roof. The person in the office wearing the IT hat or the IT friend could physically touch each machine to complete admin tasks like Windows Patching, Anti-Virus and Event checking, etc. Now we need to be proactive and have policies and tools to manage these functions as the workstation could be anywhere and online periodically or even more available outside of standard business hours. 2 – Managing user access to data/systems Securing data on the workstations located within one secure building required less thought and structure, as the building security created this. Now we need to secure the data on a workstation that could be anywhere or at a home office that we cannot see. What are users doing with this data, where are they moving and saving it? We can utilise services to apply Data Loss Protection (DLP) around your data or into your applications to enforce the correct use and location of your critical business data or even high-risk client data. 3- Managing mobile users Within a standard business, your people/user accounts would need to see a local trusted system (like a server) to authenticate for any services they need to use or to allow policies to be pushed down to them from the system. Now we can build these into one system and create a single sign-on (SSO) across all key systems, so your people only need to remember one password (decrease the risk of insecure duplicated used passwords) but also reduce the exposure to your business and data. 4 – Systems/application in use Communication systems, policy and structure were probably low on your list, after all, you where sat five feet away from your team(s) and so could communicate freely and randomly. Now your people/team is all in separate locations. Now you need a secure, controlled but easy system to allow everyone to communicate, but keeping this communication and shared documents secure must be the number one priority. Microsoft Teams in a lot of businesses is available as you already have Office 365 licences – check out of 25+ tip and shortcuts to make you a Microsoft Teams superstar! 5 – Critical data and system backup You probably had a strong backup solution as all of your critical business data was in the office with you. This for some business involves a human manual action each day, five days a week, but this was easy as everyone was in the office. Now we need solutions that require no human interaction, capture all data required and runs 24/7/365 to allow flexible working but a recovery plan for the business. 6 – Telephone systems Having a single office located system worked when everyone was in the same location and had there own desk. Hosted cloud phone systems can be deployed at a low cost per person to create easy communication streams, internal transfers, presence and call recording for compliance/training. These do not need to be completed or have any upfront capital expenditure but be configured to create efficiency and business as usual. 7- loss of equipment Now your team is working remotely the possibility of losing equipment containing confidential data or system access increases and so does the business risk. We can enforce encryption onto all devices, monitor location and remote wipe systems on demand to remove this risk.

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If you would like to discuss the methodologies more get in touch here or give us a call on 01942 835912 Discover more about our North West-based IT support services Want to learn more about what the right IT support looks like? join us on a web conference call