The office of tomorrow has forever changed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the future, companies and employees will work from anywhere, seamlessly. The new workplace of tomorrow will be anywhere you are, as long as you have internet access. The physical office will be like your favorite coffee shop: a place to gather and collaborate with and endless supply of coffee and reliable Wi-Fi.
Employees may expect that their experience working in the office is equivalent to or better than their experience working from home; for many companies, that won’t be the case. Traditional office networks are designed to communicate to data centers, not to the cloud or remote employee locations. Networks weren’t built for hundreds of video connections to internal and remote workers. If latency is liquid gold, then bandwidth is platinum availability. For more insights on that topic, check out our blog post: The Hybrid Model is the Future of the Connected Enterprise.
In this article, we’ll detail our efforts to usher in the new era of the Connected Enterprise and Hybrid Workforce.
Committed to the Digital Transformation
For the past six months, Fusion Connect has been systematically accelerating our digital transformation strategy. What might have looked like tactical changes in IT has actually been a strategic shift towards becoming a next generation workplace of tomorrow. Here’s a recap of the changes to date:
- Implementing Office 365, shifting all productivity and collaboration to the cloud
- Upgrading workstations (PC’s and Desktops) eliminating technical debt
- Standardizing our voice and collaboration services onto Teams and eliminating desk phones
- Consolidating data centers to Las Vegas and Atlanta
- Consolidating firewalls and points of entry to the network
Not only will these changes improve availability, reduce costs, and enable the hybrid workforce, they will enhance security. We will transition to a zero-trust model that will reduce the threat landscape by requiring only trusted employees to connect by VPN.
Adopting the Connected Enterprise and Hybrid Workforce Models
The new Connected Enterprise and Hybrid Workforce model requires the CIO and CISO to completely rethink security. If the workplace of tomorrow allows work from anywhere, then security needs to follow the same model. Security will need to be distributed at the endpoints and more focused at the data center. Our strategy is to have strong endpoint security, Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR), whole-disk encryption, remote patching, and advanced visibility of the end-point. In addition, by shifting to required VPN connections, we reduce the threat landscape, control access to authenticated users, and focus our security protection on our critical assets in the data center.
We will simplify our security architecture and significantly reduce the need for advanced security like Unified Threat Management (UTM) at the branch offices. That will allow us to maximize our security spend on protecting our critical assets. It will also improve our security logging and incident response, as we focus on the data center and not every branch. Instead of sifting through thousands of connections and possible points of attack, we will only have to focus on who is connected to the VPN.
In Summary
We can learn a lot about our customers from how we are thinking about the workplace of tomorrow and what it means to be a Connected Enterprise. We will be making this digital transformation internally using Fusion Connect’s products and services. Hopefully, we’ll inspire our customers to do the same.
The workplace of tomorrow is here today. We might not know what the next technology revolution or evolution will look like, but our IT and Security strategy will provide the flexibility to change and adapt to the demands from our employees, vendors, and partners tomorrow and beyond.
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Fusion Connect manages, orchestrates, and secures the critical technology infrastructure that enables the connected enterprise. Contact us for more information at .
