September 2, 2020

Remote Work in the Coronavirus Era

Key Takeaways:

Many companies have adopted remote work to keep employees safe during the coronavirus pandemic.
But remote work is not without its pitfalls.
Productivity and security are compromised by decentralized work environments.
Pareteum Experience Cloud can help boost productivity and improve security.

How can the Pareteum Experience Cloud improve remote work? Set up a meeting!

What is the Remote Work Revolution?

In the era of coronavirus, many companies have turned to remote work to keep their employees safe and their businesses productive. This has prompted LinkedIn pundits, tech journalists, and opportunistic marketeers across the world to ascend their respective rostrums and presage the immanentization of the “Remote Work Revolution.”

But, as a matter of fact, this revolution pre-exists the pandemic; keyboard prognosticators have spent years building their case for decentralizing the workforce. In their 2019 survey, State of Remote Work, the social media software company Buffer found some 99 percent of polled employees expressed interest in working remotely for at least a portion of their careers. Flexible scheduling was cited as the top benefit.

Now, it’s quite likely the arrival of coronavirus has advanced the cause of remote work — it might even prove to be the “shot heard round the world.” But if it’s a revolution you’re looking for, then it comes courtesy of technological innovation, not the workforce’s desire to take meetings from the kitchen table.

At Pareteum, we’ve spent decades building communications offerings — from universal Wi-Fi solutions, to global cellular connectivity, to P2P and A2P messaging capabilities, and more. These offerings were built for communications service providers, IoT developers and, most germane to the topic at hand, enterprise companies. Thus, in so many words, we know a thing or two about remote work, because we’ve built technology that makes it possible.

So if you’re noticing a hint of incredulity, it’s not because we oppose the revolution, per se. It’s simply that, no matter how many people want a decentralized work environment, few are as familiar with the downside risks as we are.

Want to learn more about Pareteum’s enterprise mobility solutions? Let’s chat!

What are the Risks of Remote Work?

In a previous blog post on the “Gordian Knot of Enterprise Connectivity,” we noted that an ill-begotten mobility strategy could have serious financial and reputational consequences for your company — crippling cyber-attacks, out of control mobility spend, hidden mobility costs, lackluster employee productivity, etc. And, here’s the thing, the more employees you have operating outside the safe confines of the corporate office, the more potential there is for things to go catastrophically awry.

Indeed, whether your employees are working from home, the corner café, or onboard a flight 31,000 feet over Ypsilanti, you’ll have to consider the following:

How to keep them connected and productive
How to keep your company data secure

So, let’s briefly discuss how the Pareteum Experience Cloud can help facilitate both.

How to Keep Remote Workers Connected and Productive

Returning to the Gordian knot of enterprise connectivity:

“From the sales team to the delivery drivers, your employees are critical to the success of your business. Keeping them productive is essential to your bottom line. That’s why you need an enterprise mobility strategy that enables your employees to maximize their value by keeping them connected wherever they are.”

To facilitate this, the Pareteum Experience Cloud for Enterprise offers integrated global Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity in 200+ countries and territories. This includes access in:

Tens-of-millions of commercial and community venues
Hundreds-of-thousands of restaurants, cafés, and coffee shops
Tens-of-thousands of hotels and hospitality sites
More than 5,000 airplanes from 40 of the world’s leading airlines
Nearly 500 airports
And more!

Additionally, if your employees find that they’re having bandwidth issues while working remotely, they can visit www.wifilookup.com to find the nearest Pareteum Wi-Fi hotspot.

Enterprises can also take some inspiration from telecommunications service providers, utilities companies, healthcare providers, and other such services, who rely on SMS for coordination between dispatchers and field technicians. Indeed, with the Experience Cloud’s SMS solution, businesses can streamline operations by directly and efficiently communicating with remote employees.

For more on these productivity boosting offerings, check out some of our older blogs!

How to Keep Company Data Secure in a Remote Work Environment

For most people, the challenges associated with public Wi-Fi are relatively benign — poor connection quality, Wi-Fi congestion, the fact that you’ve got to ask the barista for the password, etc. But for businesses, public hotspots pose substantial security risks.

Indeed, all it takes is one employee connecting to one rogue hotspot for the entire company to be put in harm’s way. While the operational consequences may hinder a company’s ability to deliver their services, the reputational costs could be even more disastrous — lost business, nervous investors, class action lawsuits, febrile regulators, etc.

Back in 2018, iPass conducted a survey that found that 57 percent of CIOs suspect their mobile workers had been hacked or were the cause of security problems. Moreover, only 46 percent could be confident their remote employees used virtual private networks (VPNs) to increase security when connecting to company networks.

Perhaps more consequentially, iPass also found that remote workers lack an understanding of the severity of common security risks. For instance, a whopping 62 percent of Wi-Fi-related security incidents happened when employees used networks in cafes or coffee shops.

So, to keep your company data and IT infrastructure secure, the Pareteum Experience Cloud leverages:

Single sign-on technology to facilitate automatic connections without requiring any personal log-in information
Last Mile VPN to secure all connections against common public Wi-Fi pitfalls, such as “Man-in-the-Middle” attacks

To learn more about how the Pareteum Experience Cloud facilitates mobile security, set up a meeting!

Improve Remote Work Started with Pareteum Experience Cloud

Decentralized workplaces may very well be the office of the future. And the coronavirus pandemic may yet prove to be the Lexington and Concord of the “Remote Work Revolution.” Nevertheless, remote work confronts businesses with several difficult hurdles. Fortunately, at Pareteum, we find ourselves in the unique position to help enterprises clear them.

So, if you have any questions about the Pareteum Experience Cloud’s enterprise mobility solutions, please feel free to reach out. We’d love to discuss it with you in more detail!