HITS

Challenges Remain to Enable Hybrid Work, Teradici Report Says

Although hybrid work has become widespread as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, challenges still linger for companies when it comes to security, technology and user experience, according to the recent HP Teradici “Hybrid Work Report 2022: The Strategic Role of Digital Workspaces.”

“The biggest challenge to the successful implementation of hybrid work models has been around employee experience,” the report said, noting 59 percent of respondents highlighted how employees experienced issues with pixelation and latency that “made it detrimental to use remote desktops.”

Meanwhile, 34 percent found the maintenance and management of remote desktops “cumbersome,” and 32 percent said the implementation process for remoting technology was too difficult.

In addition to technology, staff attitudes within companies were also a barrier to adopting hybrid work solutions, the report said, pointing out 25 percent of respondents reported staff adoption of technology had been a hurdle, while 17 percent pointed to a lack of internal buy-in during the evaluation stage.

The most important computing issues to address to enable hybrid work, meanwhile, are creating or revising a work-from-home policy, procuring additional hardware for staff, setting up a virtual private network (VPN) for employee access to the corporate network, and setting up virtual machines, DaaS or VDI for remote desktop usage, the report said.

“With the swift adoption of hybrid models and technology, administrative computing issues needed to be addressed,” according to the report.

But “sentiment around priorities and challenges have not changed significantly—only about 5 percent—since” the firm conducted its 2021 Remote Work Survey, it said. For 50 percent of the respondents, creating or revising the existing work-from-home policy remains the biggest computing issue, according to the company.

40 percent of respondents said procuring additional hardware for staff was a priority, while 37 percent pointed to setting up VPNs as a barrier, 34 percent pointed to the process of installing virtual machines, DaaS or VDI for remote desktop usage as a bigger computing issue for them, the report said.

Analyzing Some of the Data

For the report, Teradici surveyed 273 “IT leaders” from various industries online February 24 to May 5, 2022.

In an interview, Ziad Lammam, global head of Teradici Product Management, said a significant number of respondents were from the media and entertainment sector (28 percent). IT followed at 25 percent, ahead of education  (12 percent), finance (9 percent), AEC (9 percent), government/military (7 percent), and healthcare (3 percent).

“It was really good to see [a] shift in focus from, ‘Hey, how do I work from home?’ or ‘how do I work remotely?’” Lammam  said. The report really touches on how an organization actually has to really change at the core to support hybrid work, he noted.

“The fundamental takeaway from the report [is] the evolution of hybrid work into not just IT, but” also human resources and “focusing on employee productivity and not just about connecting employees from home,” he said.

Additionally, “for me, it was really interesting to see that while we’re seeing that and we’ve got work to do too to to make it better, but the large majority, I think … [about] three quarters of organizations kind of are in that same boat where they’ve sort of started to recognize that they need to make the” transition to hybrid work, he said. Many have started “making that kind of organizational process shift, or at least started thinking about it,” he added.

Also significant is that “hybrid work is now seen as strategic versus just ‘let me connect my employees and then we’re back to where we were, you know, three years ago,’” he said.

The fact that hybrid work is now seen as “strategic to the business [is] really great because that means organizations will look at more investment in hybrid work but also more process change to deliver on the hybrid work promise essentially,” he added.

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