2020 will likely be remembered as the year of the tipping point for working remotely. According to Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report, 43% of employees reported that they regularly worked remotely before COVID-19. With millions more forced out of the workplace and working from home, a dramatic shift is occurring in the way people will work in the future. In a survey of CFOs, 74% said they expect to permanently shift some employees to remote work.
How are you handling the technology that keeps your employees productive and your data secure? Here are some ways that Texas companies are adapting.
Reliable Business Internet
Whether your workers are in the office or working remotely, they need secure and reliable access to company resources. So one of your first steps is ensuring that they’re working on a business internet network. Robust, reliable business internet is essential for office as well as remote workers. If you use a residential, cable or national business internet provider, it is time to reevaluate whether the company can provide the level of service your employees and customers need.
A Hosted PBX
A hosted private branch exchange (PBX) connected to business internet gives remote workers access to the advanced functionality they have on their work phones. Since hosted PBX is a cloud-based solution, employees can still take advantage of features such as call forwarding, call recording, three-way calling and call transfer.
Companies that use hosted PBX can install soft clients, or apps, on their employees’ desktop and mobile devices at home to give them access to the same voice tools they have at work. They can make calls from any device and route them through your secure company network; they can also have calls routed to their home when customers call the office phone number. This also allows employees to keep their personal phone numbers private.
Enhanced Security
When the shutdown sent employees home to work, they were using a hodge-podge of personal electronic devices, free software tools and apps. This led to a fair amount of frustration and increased security risks in some cases.
Phishing attempts that target at-home workers put company networks at risk. There are plenty of stories about free video conferencing tools being hacked, and trolls interjecting hate speech and even pornography during business meetings. It got so bad that it prompted an FBI warning.
Leading Texas companies demand that their business internet provider use an advanced cryptographic protocol such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2, a more secure version of the TLS protocol. A hosted PBX that uses TLS 1.2 provides an encrypted security solution.
Companies are also implementing additional security measures by taking advantage of the benefits that unified communications and collaboration tools offer,such as the ability to assign authorization levels to enter secure rooms and requiring outsiders to request access to video conferences before being allowed to join.
Enhanced Communications
In the online world, latency is the time to takes for a request to travel from the sender to the receiver. High latency on a network means that it takes longer to access a website or retrieve information from a server. However, there is another kind of latency that can frustrate remote workers: human latency.Human latency occurs when employees cannot communicate effectively, have trouble reaching a manager,or encounter long delays in getting the information they need to do their work.
Unified communications, conferencing, and collaboration tools enable instant connections regardless of where employees are working. Texas companies that have adapted best to remote working have deployed unified communications as a service to connect their employees with the tools they need to reduce human latency.
Unified communications from the best business internet providers work across devices so that employees can work remotely on their desktop computer, laptop, tablet or cellphone and bring all communications channels onto a single platform. This service can improve productivity and speed up response times by as much as 20%.
Colocation Data Centers
Many companies are also moving servers and equipment off-site to colocation data centers. By using a secure connection, businesses can reduce operating costs and free up their information technology teams to focus on the needs of the remote workforce.
Keep Everyone Connected
When working with business internet providers, it’s important that they can provide the service you need to keep your remote workers productive and your data secure. Robust business internet, hosted PBX, and a suite of unified communications and collaboration tools can reduce the frustrations and challenges of working from home.
LOGIX Fiber Networks is Texas’ leading business internet company and serves more than 10,000 of the state’s most demanding companies. LOGIX provides top-performing companies throughout Texas with robust and reliable business internet, hosted PBX, unified communications, conferencing and data centers. Contact LOGIX today for a quote.
