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Tag: distributed workforce

  • A Distributed Workforce is the New Normal

    A Distributed Workforce is the New Normal

    The pandemic emphasized and improved what we have known for decades: A team does not need to be centrally located to be productive. This varies based on the people involved and roles being fulfilled, but honestly, lots of people can work just fine from home, a coffee shop, the pool …

    And while we could debate the wisdom and usefulness of lockdowns forever, they did drive organizations that had never considered distributed work to actually take the plunge. Many are returning to centralized organizations, but a significant number of employees have moved to where they would like to live to work from home, and some of those employees will not be back.

    I normally avoid reference to any contentious societal discussion, but the lockdowns and pushback directly impact us in IT. The circle that was our network had already expanded to include public cloud, hosting providers and SaaS providers. Now it includes all of those plus some–perhaps only one or two, perhaps many–home offices. And that is unlikely to change, no matter how hard an organization tries. If nothing else, motivated individuals will want to work from home after hours, and if they are salaried, the organization will support that approach—meaning we in IT will have to support that approach.

    A deep look at what that implies is necessary. One of the things that having a sudden “work from home or shut down” mandate imposed upon companies did was make security an afterthought. For the first couple of months of 100%-remote work, we saw crazy numbers of access misconfigurations that caused breaches. That’s just the easy one. Your source is in a publicly accessible repository. Are the tools to access that source secure? Are you sure? What about SaaS? Is there a method other than user-generated passwords required to access each SaaS? Do you even know what SaaS systems business users have adopted? Does the organization use password management? It is necessary since SSO isn’t covering everything, and really can’t.

    The same is true for accessibility. Management teams started with, “Let’s get people working,” because the alternative to people working was layoffs or even corporate bankruptcy. If you paid any attention at all in that timeframe, you heard the horror stories of IT going to employees’ houses and setting up or troubleshooting corporate desktops that went home. It was an ugly time, and only afterward did organizations start to consider options for handling communications. Is it policy to have someone go to a nearby coffee shop when their connection is down, or is that a day off? Can they work without connectivity and then upload afterward? Most organizations still don’t have coherent policies in this regard, allowing teams to decide. In fairness, not every employee is great at working from home, so it is possibly the best option to have team leads deal with failed communications issues … But a corporate policy or guidelines should still be developed, and technical solutions like satellite backup should also be considered.

    Organizations rushed to WFH and then rushed to return-to-office (RTO). Your job is to make sure that, with all of the rushing, things are stable and secure. You’ve been rocking it all along—don’t let shifting corporate priorities drag you down now.

  • BigPanda Provides Free 90-Day Access to IT Ops Platform

    BigPanda Provides Free 90-Day Access to IT Ops Platform

    BigPanda, a provider of an IT ops platform infused with machine learning algorithms, this week announced it will make available for free for 90 days an instance of its software available to IT professionals working from home to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Mohan Kompella, vice president of product marketing for BigPanda, said the IT Ops From Home program is intended to make it easier for IT teams to manage IT operations using a platform that was designed from the ground up to remotely manage highly distributed computing environments.

    BigPanda is also providing free 90-day support along with free training via a virtual classroom. Organizations that opt to participate in the program are under no obligation to renew.

    Kompella said the BigPanda platform is designed to correlate events in a way that automates IT incident management. It provides built-in integrations with software and services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), AppDynamics, Cloudwatch, Splunk, Azure, Jira and Slack.

    It may take a little effort for IT organizations to implement a new platform for managing IT in the midst of a pandemic, he conceded, but also noted there are organizations that are finding their existing IT platforms are not designed to enable IT teams to support an entire workforce that is now accessing distributed applications from home. The BigPanda platform makes it possible to unify the management of all the silos that now make up an enterprise IT environment—in fact, Kompella said managing IT environments remotely may soon become the “new normal.” In much the same way many organizations now employ remote workers to provide customer service, Kompella noted it’s possible many IT support staff will now simply work from home. That approach would, among other things, reduce the cost of office space for IT personnel.

    As organizations struggle to implement business continuity plans there’s no doubt many legacy IT operations platforms are being stretched to their limit. Many of the plans organizations had to slowly transition to a modern IT management platform now need to be accelerated, said Kompella.

    There’s no doubt the COVID-10 pandemic will have a profound impact on the way IT is managed. Many processes will be forever altered, especially as organizations embrace DevOps processes to manage application workloads that are increasingly likely to be deployed in the cloud, as part of a concerted effort to make business processes more resilient in the face of global disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, no one is quite sure when the current crisis might subside or return. There may even additional pandemics to contend with in the future.

    Whatever the motivation, an evolutionary approach to modernizing IT ops will be moving forward at a faster pace among organizations that have the wherewithal to stave off the current economic downturn caused by the pandemic. In fact, there may even be a high correlation between organizations that fail to modernize those processes and those organizations that don’t re-emerge stronger in 2021.

    — Mike Vizard