According to a 2022 survey by McKinsey , 58% of Americans have the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week. This trend is accelerating a shift from traditional IT solutions to cloud-based alternatives that are better suited to supporting a distributed workforce. Gartner predicts that enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will overtake spending on traditional IT in 2025 in four key market segments.
More than three years on from the lowest point of the Covid-19 pandemic, remote working has evolved from a temporary emergency measure to standard operating procedure for many organizations. Concurrently, the debate around remote and hybrid working is changing; from how best to set up and secure hybrid connections to how to ensure optimum performance for end users. Remote working is here to stay, and canny IT leaders are now focused on delivering the best possible network and application performance.
This is often easier said than done. In traditional office-centric networking, IT teams can “ringfence” access to network resources and optimize the performance of applications. When working from home, public libraries, or coffee shops, remote workers are at the mercy of their “last mile” internet connections. Particularly outside of metropolitan areas, these connections are often relatively poor, and that can significantly affect the performance of cloud applications.
Solving the last-mile performance challenge is crucial if enterprises are to realize in full the benefits of remote and hybrid working. With better access to cloud applications, employees will benefit from a better experience and productivity will increase. Ultimately, it offers a competitive differentiator, with a new class of home-work optimized business benefiting from an efficient and effective distributed workforce.
One company looking to make this vision a reality is Replify, which has created a unique software-based approach to WAN Optimization. According to Andrew Caruth, Replify’s CTO, the last-mile problem can only be solved through software: “Most workers lack the technical skills required to set up and manage complex hardware within the home,” he says. “Software clients are easy to install and can be hardware agnostic, which gives enterprises flexibility around which platforms they use.”
Replify’s Mobile Accelerator Client enables end-to-end WAN Optimization over the last mile directly to end user devices. Through protocol optimization, data de-duplication and compression technologies, the Mobile Accelerator Client both reduces bandwidth usage and improves application performance and responsiveness. Significantly, once IT has installed the client on their devices, users need take no action – the client works in the background leaving people free to get on with their jobs.
According to Andrew Caruth, WAN Optimization is the final piece of the home working jigsaw: “WAN Optimization can accelerate the transition to high-performance remote and hybrid working,” he says. “With the technology in place, home workers will be able to access cloud applications with the same speed and performance as if they had never left the office.”
You can learn more about WAN Optimization here
For more information on Replify’s remote working solution click here
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