Since the height of COVID quarantines in early 2020, working remotely surged quickly with 87% of all businesses requiring employees to leave the office building behind. Working from home had already been growing steadily, and most employees (96%) report being satisfied with the changes to their work environment; not the mention that our family pets make the best coworkers. Now that we are a few months into 2021, the “new normal” of doing business remotely is still going strong. In fact, 80% of company executives say that they intend to keep remote work alive long after the COVID pandemic is a thing of the past.
Despite all the positives of working from home, like flexibility and lowered costs, there are also some drawbacks that companies have to take the necessary time to overcome. In surveys, 94% of remote professionals report having challenging problems that they didn’t face while working in the office. Some of the problems come from their subpar network connections. In fact, 43% of surveyors report that they had to use hotspots or phones to get their work done during quarantine. Sixty-nine percent report having issues with the VPN, and 38% say that, at one time or another, they were unable to complete work tasks due to a slow or poor connection.
The other big, and most concerning, issue facing remote workers and their employers is that of network security. Pre-pandemic, 71% of companies reported satisfaction with their network security measures, but post-pandemic, that number is just 44%. In 2020, in-home data usage jumped by 38% percent, to 16.6 GB per month. It’s no wonder, then, with employees connecting in ways that may be far less secure than their in-house company networks, that 60% of companies report an increase in cyber attacks in 2020.
Regardless of vaccines and lifted restrictions, remote work is here to stay and connectivity issues must quickly be resolved for companies to function at full steam. Fortunately, one solution is already available through Ananda Networks.
Ananda Networks provides a private network that takes only minutes to set up. It’s cloud-managed and uses only software, rather than any hardware rollouts, which means a significantly lowered administrative cost. It also upgrades network security to zero-trust access and full visibility, and network performance can be improved by up to 25x.
A remote workforce is the future of business. It’s time for a network that works as hard as you do.
