The shift to the hybrid workforce is inevitable, and over the past 18 months, remote work boosted productivity and cost savings for most companies. 75% of organizations now expect at least 30% of their employees to work remotely. Going forward, organizatio ns need agile cloud networking to support workers wherever they are.

At Productivity in the Hybrid Workplace: Leveraging Cloud Networking to Support a Global Workforce on August 26, the panel of experts discussed best practices for making hybrid employee s as digitally effective as possible post - cloud migration.

Keep reading our top event takeaways to understand why now is the time to evaluate and optimize your existing infrastructure.

1. Hybrid work poses more social than technological difficulties.

Sriram Ramanathan of Genpact thinks that the shift to a hybrid workforce has posed more social than technological challenges for engineers and product developers.

Before the pandemic, employees were accustomed to rigid, in - person routines like their morning commute and coworker coffee breaks. Technologically, the shift to the hybrid workforce has been fairly straightforward. Yet socially, engineers and product developers have found it difficult to adapt. Doing so requires them to make a “mindset change,” whic h, Sriram argued, is no easy feat

2. Security is the biggest challenge of remote work.

IT teams now need to develop new security solutions to problems that were inconceivable before the shift to remote or hybrid work. For instance, if an enterprise has 1 ,000 employees working from home, that means there are 1,000 different log - in locations. More log - in locations means more encrypted networks and VPN bandwidth, which can increase the risk of security breaches

Now that VPN networks are so “bogged down,” said Sushil Motwani of Oracle Health Sciences, he feels that, “security has definitely been the biggest change” for the IT industry in the last year and a half.

3. Visibility is more important than it’s ever been.

“One of the things that enterprises need more than ever is visibility,” Sriram asserted. Given how transient the hybrid workforce is, visibility is paramount. “The need to measure and cater to the employee experience is more important than anything else.”

In practice, this means enterprises must focus on measuring bandwidth and connectivity, while developing a metric to identify interruptions before they occur.

4. The world is thinking about work in new ways.

Cloud migration and the shift to the hybrid workforce are two separate phenomena, Sushil noted. Cloud migration has been around since 2014, whereas the shift to hybrid began at the onset of the pandemic.

The post - cloud migration hybrid workforce has not changed the way we work as much as it has the way we think about work. “What has changed is the mindset of the people,” said Sushil.

5. Productivity metrics remain unchanged.

The metrics that enterprises use to measure productivity have not changed, said Sriram. However, the data enterprises must apply their metrics to has changed significantly.

For instance, because employees are now working from more locations than ever before, the number of endpoints has “exploded.” To accurately measure productivity, enterprises must figure out how to apply their tried - and - true metrics to high scores of endpoints

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