What made it possible for employees to transition as well as they did to full-time remote working? Their endpoints. Endpoints are a critical component of the digital workplace, which has been made all the more pronounced by the COVID pandemic.
The sudden shift to remote working has made the endpoint landscape more complex, and it will become even more so in the post-COVID world. The rise of the work from anywhere (WFA) enterprise will greatly complicate the endpoint landscape for organizations because it creates orders of magnitude more endpoints to manage and secure within not only homes, but any remote location that employees want to work from. What’s more, hardware, software, and networks at these endpoints are—and will continue to become—much more variable and unique, with local infrastructure that can diverge considerably from endpoint to endpoint.
All of this makes it quite challenging for organizations to create a positive digital employee experience that can sustain high levels of satisfaction and productivity. This is not a theoretical issue by any means. In fact, 1E’s latest research on the remote employee experience during the pandemic found that over a third of remote knowledge workers are experiencing more IT issues when working at home. A similar number report that it’s taking longer to get IT issues resolved when working remotely. As a result, workers also tend to hold a dim view of the support they do get, with only 30% believing IT has the capabilities to support a remote workforce.
As the post-pandemic world comes closer into view, organizations need to evolve their IT infrastructures now to ensure workers have dependable and, therefore, continuously functioning networks and computing devices. Fortunately, compelling solutions now exist to manage a significantly greater number and variety of service delivery endpoints as workers use a richer mix of corporate and personal devices to carry out their daily responsibilities. We find that organizations that lack efficient and effective means of managing today's far more heterogenous endpoint landscape will routinely suffer operational and productivity issues.
Organizations seeking to deliver a best-in-class remote work experience will need to ensure they have endpoint management capabilities that:

  • Provides real-time visibility and control over all remote endpoints
  • Enables self-servicing by remote workers with endpoint issues
  • Proactively confirms that remote endpoints are functioning and automatically take action when issues are found
  • Regularly measures the quality of the endpoint experience from the workers point of view
  • Ensures security and compliance at endpoints across a wide mix of hardware and network configurations

Endpoint management is just one of the core infrastructure pillars required to support the work from anywhere enterprise. At this year’s WFA enterprise conference, I’ll be presenting the first ever IT blueprint for the WFA enterprise to help IT leaders succeed in the work from anywhere world.
Sign up now to get one of the last remaining seats.
Work From Anywhere Enterprise Conference 2020