Remote Work and Happy, Productive Employees
Employee productivity has become the subject of several studies and discussions after the hybrid work model was adopted by enterprises globally. This subject draws attention from multiple functions, most importantly human resources. The human resource function sees employee productivity as keeping employees engaged, motivated, and connected with their teams. Another function that impacts employee productivity significantly is technology, which supports hybrid users. The applications and IT services (security, networking, collaboration, etc.) used by the enterprise determine the productivity that employees can achieve working from any location.
It is not easy to change the apps or services or switch to alternative options quickly in enterprises. Therefore, making the apps and services more efficient and effective can improve employee productivity. Productivity, in general, is defined as the quantum of work delivered in a unit of time. When employees are expected to use enterprise apps and services to perform their jobs, productivity depends on the performance of these enterprise apps and services. In this blog, we explore some of the use cases where enterprises needed better performance from apps and services to ensure their users are productive at all times.
Virtual Desktops (VDI)
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a critical application in several enterprises. Industries like BFSI and Pharma use VDI apps to run their business apps and collaborate with partners. VDIs are highly sensitive to network performance. While VDIs are blamed for slowness, most of the time, other factors such as network issues or high latency, impact the VDI performance. One of our existing customers has users working from several locations, such as Mexico and Kolkata. The users were experiencing bad performance on AWS Workspaces VDI service because of local ISP and access-mile Wi-Fi network issues. The customer tried Cloudbrink, and users were able to work on their VDIs without any lag or delay or applications hanging. The VDI session was responsive and workable even at packet loss rates of 5%. Since VDI is the main “app” for the users, a highly responsive VDI session improved the productivity of these users significantly.
HD-conference calls
Customer-facing functions within enterprises (eg: support, sales, call centers) faced significant challenges during Covid because customer interaction became virtual. It is never possible to replace a human face-to-face interaction with virtual calls. The best these enterprises/functions could expect is to have high-definition (HD) quality calls to ensure their customers get the services effectively. The quality of conference calls (video freeze, audio stuttering, screen share hangs) depends on the reliability of the network. Due to this reason, users can’t be on customer calls from anywhere. Cloudbrink has profiled all the major UCaaS products and based on this intelligence, several remediation techniques are applied for underlying network issues. The result is that the quality of conference calls is always very high. Even in sub-optimal network conditions, Cloudbrink provides high-quality (MOS > 4) conference calls.
Large file operations
Some teams that are involved in architecture, game development or medical reports examination tools must work on files that are several gigabytes. A typical hi-def game file will be 40-60GB. Similarly, large blueprints of architecture will be 30GB in size as an example. When these team members are collaborating in a hybrid work mode, the time it takes to exchange these large files between users or to update the files to the data center over a VPN takes several hours. VPNs become a big bottleneck here. A customer of Cloudbrink from the gaming industry was able to transfer these large files (~50GB file) to their central perforce repository within a few minutes. Over their incumbent VPN solution, the same operation ran into hours, which was a productivity killer for this organization.
The Remote Work model requires a revolutionary approach to deliver applications and data to users from anywhere in an effective manner so that employee productivity is improved. Patching up existing products or re-branding existing solutions might not be able to give the solutions needed for modern workstyles.
