Consumer technologies, particularly mobile devices, and enterprise technologies focusing on secure data storage are offering a plethora of options for safekeeping data. While storage options have become increasingly affordable with a multitude of choices for data preservation, it's crucial to consider the ease of access. The cost in this context doesn't refer to a direct monetary value associated with data retrieval; instead, it refers to the cost of user experience and convenience involved in accessing the stored data.
"Conventional factors of Workplace Interruptions in the pre-Covid era & The Cost of Interrupted Work" is a well-researched topic by the University of California, Irvine. New research in the post-Covid era probably needs to account for the data explosion, and the storage and access costs associated with it (Did you hear? The network is the interrupter!).
In the new world where data is the new oil, networking is the lubricant. Network performance is hurting you more than you realize, and guess what? We have Brink Savings.
In the world of hybrid workers, working from the office with all resources on the same local network for part of the week and struggling to get any work done the rest of the week introduces enormous mental stress. Add to that the fact that some team members are remote and others are in the office, leading to different productivity levels and impacting team dynamics and overall output.
In the modern world, the following simple examples illustrate the loss of productivity:
- A single poor conference call
- Time taken to access a file during a critical production outage
- Slowness in sharing data with colleagues for interactive work
Bad calls can disrupt cohesive thought processes, leading to longer times to close critical items. Bad audio can lead to misinterpretations of information. Poor download speed of critical files can lead to workplace frustration, resulting in a domino effect within the team. Downloads taking longer can also be productivity interrupters from a conventional standpoint, simply due to lost focus.
IT infrastructure and security teams bear the brunt of the frustration as they try to solve new-age problems with legacy technology. "Box in the middle" technologies cannot scale in the real world, and there are enough personal devices being carried everywhere. These teams need modern endpoint-focused (laptops, tablets, mobile phones) network technologies to enable large hybrid, mobile, and agile teams to be happily productive.
They need to get Cloudbrink Hybrid Access as a Service (HAaaS) - hassle-free, easy to use, no box to carry, and built-in transparent redundancy across all your devices.
Cloudbrink provides HAaaS to solve the productivity problem. By analyzing and quantifying the savings of customers using Cloudbrink and talking to them, we have some interesting observations:
- Developers spending time to sync up overnight builds can experience delays in starting their work by an hour or more in certain cases (VPNs are slow). Cloudbrink HAaaS can reduce that time to minutes, adding an hour of productivity for developers straight away, effectively increasing their available time by 15%.
- Two out of ten conference call attendees with bad endpoint network connections can elongate calls by 20%. Conference calls have multiple potential failure points, including audio device issues. However, the real-time nature of the application and sensitivity to latency issues affect productivity.
- Servers having to deal with the recovery of packets due to poor endpoint networks will create more stress on the overall solution, leading to even poorer performance. More concurrent connections on the server lead to an overall reduction in throughput, affecting end-user productivity. Scaling out servers for a secure mobile endpoint network problem is not the fix!
Real-world data points to the fact that endpoint network performance has a significant impact on the productivity of the hybrid workforce and should be classified as a real interrupter for work. This is an area of research that should be further pursued to understand its impact on employee satisfaction and enterprise productivity!
