Creating a Roadmap for Remote Working

You have staff at temporary offices, employees shuttling between regional offices and corporate headquarters, and people telecommuting from home. So how do you optimize workforce productivity and empower better collaboration?

Today’s businesses are increasingly on the move – and with this rise in enterprise mobility comes the need for better tools to facilitate, manage, monitor and secure an increasingly dispersed workforce. Getting the right information at the right time to the right people in the right place has never been so important, and companies are looking to state-of-the-art communications to help them address the associated challenges.

While the need for better enterprise communication is nothing new, a number of key developments have contributed to its recent rise in profile. Continued globalization, for instance, has led to an increased requirement for secure, high-performance, applications-enabled networking. Securing the extended enterprise so that companies are able to strategically connect partners, suppliers and customers on a global basis is also becoming a key issue as companies look to collaborate more fruitfully with both internal and external colleagues. Meanwhile, the trend towards global ‘greening’ – and the rise in use of solutions such as conferencing, location-based services and paperless billing as alternatives to traditional ways of doing business – is driving the uptake of solutions such as on-demand computing, immersive video technologies like telepresence, and unified communications.

It’s partly about improving the efficiency of the business and partly about helping employees to achieve an optimum work-life balance. Telecommuting, collaboration, mobility tools and remote access solutions are all important strategies for companies looking to add greater flexibility, as well as productivity, to their workforce. In addition, the fact that the CIO is now widely seen as a business strategist charged with ensuring the tight integration of business and technology to help control costs, increase productivity and achieve a range of corporate objectives, is also leading to a greater focus on the business benefits of mobility solutions.

Kevin Irland, Media Manager at Verizon has no doubt that mobility can create a significant competitive advantage. “Enterprise mobility solutions have evolved in recent years,” he says. “Where once you had tactical deployments whereby only select users had access to mobility solutions that enabled specific tasks, we now have corporate-wide remote LAN access, and secure and seamless application interfaces that provide extended access to suppliers, partners, distributors and customers.” 

Verizon Business is at the forefront of these developments. The company delivers advanced IP, data, voice and wireless solutions to large business and government, and offers a broad mobility portfolio, including wireless voice and data capabilities; various messaging options (including voicemail, hosted exchange and hosted secure IM) for timely and effective communications; network-based applications – such as audio, web and video conferencing and VoIP – that enable and drive collaboration; solutions to secure corporate and customer data; proven customer premise equipment from leading vendors; and flexible network connectivity choices for data access.

“Verizon’s business mobility roadmap can be best thought of as an evolutionary process toward seamless and transparent mobility,” says Irland. “Mobility enables the extended enterprise, making work an activity not a location. Our highly secure, centrally managed solutions enable you to check email, download files, access the internet and return phone calls; access mission-critical documents and data securely; sync leading devices to your desktop; and collaborate more effectively thanks to innovative conferencing, voice and instant messaging solutions.”

Such solutions are backed by 24/7 customer support and include high security from the network to the end-point – enabling companies to give staff the tools and access they need. And Verizon Business can also help upgrade and strengthen internal networks and implement some of the latest mobile technologies with cutting-edge network services.

Indeed, Irland believes today’s evolving business trends require a different kind of technology provider. “We currently have a situation whereby we have a mix of systems integrators, software vendors, IT outsourcers and carriers all offering different services,” he says. “However, in the near-future we’ll see all these different services – network services, IT services, wireless and applications services – converge. The new service provider will need to be able to leverage the power of the network and at the same time integrate all these different IT solutions. It’s a big challenge.”

But one that Verizon is meeting head on. A key plank of the company’s strategy going forward is based around the idea of fixed/mobile convergence. In terms of the customer experience, this will mean a single contract for mobile/fixed voice, 3G data, SMS and push email service that offers integrated enterprise/mobile voicemail, the ability to move calls between pre-registered fixed and mobile lines, and reduced roaming costs and an increased mobile data footprint when in managed WiFi.

“Our professional services can help you fully assess your current network infrastructure and its capabilities to support mobility applications, and provide recommendations for upgrades that will allow you to fully exploit emerging mobility technologies,” says Irland. “Whatever your mobility requirements, Verizon Business can help you enhance remote workforce productivity and efficiency and empower collaboration with solutions that expand the reach of your home office.”

Six steps to a world-class mobility solution

1. Think strategic
Yes, mobility helps increase remote worker productivity, offers increased access to business information, and enhances collaboration and communication. But mobility can also play a key role in the delivery of new services that make your enterprise more responsive to the market and your customers.

2. Put security first
Mobility means a myriad of new devices and applications. That means security is priority number one. You need a provider who understands how to engineer security into the very core of your network infrastructure.

3. Include voice and meeting applications
Integrate voice with the rest of your network traffic to control costs and obtain advanced functionality. The right solution must include a single, centrally billed employee number, whether you're at your desk, using VoIP from home or using your mobile phone on the road. In addition, remote workers need the ability to interact with colleagues as if they were in the office, by using reservation-less ‘instant meetings’.

4. Don't try to do everything in-house
Having the right partner to design, build, support and, most of all, administer a new mobility plan leaves you free to focus on your business. Managing your existing network and applications is a big challenge.

5. Select devices with care
Different people need different devices. A BlackBerry is more valuable for some, for others the laptop is the best solution. Your enterprise needs to identify the right tools for each employee and implement a network solution that can handle all devices.

6. Choose the right partner
Verizon Business offers a truly integrated solution, including consultancy, devices, and infrastructure. Let us help you devise a strategy that meets the particular requirements of your enterprise.