Is your IT Infrastructure ready for hybrid working?

More and more companies are transitioning to a hybrid work arrangement and flexible working models in order to improve the employee work-life balance, their wellbeing, and to adopt a more adaptive working environment. The new hybrid working model is a location-flexible arrangement, that allows employees to combine onsite and offsite working as agreed with their employer. Following the gradual lifting of COVID lockdowns worldwide, a broad range of hybrid arrangements have emerged, giving employees flexibility that was very rarely offered before.

As we all reimagine the future of the workplace, the benefits of remote and hybrid work for employees and employers are becoming clear. Many large worldwide organisations including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have announced that they will allow more workers to continue working from home post-pandemic.

While ‘hybrid’ is key to understanding the more flexible future of work, it encompasses many possible systems. Hybrid work tends to include more freedom around when to work as well as where. It generally grants more autonomy to employees to fit work around the rest of their lives, rather than structuring other parts of a weekday around hours logged in an office. Ideally, it’s the best of both worlds: structure and sociability on one hand, and independence and flexibility on the other.  Therefore businesses are starting to think about the long-term options, including alternative ways to structure work communication and collaboration as well as physical presence.

At present, business owners are starting to ask the question to their employees, of ‘how they would like to work moving forward’.  Many businesses are currently managing in different ways – some have given employees the option to continue working remotely until at least 2022, other businesses have called staff back to the workplace on different time schedules and in staggered groups and others are leaving it entirely up to individual employees to decide where to base themselves.

A common procedure of existing hybrid working businesses, that accelerated since the pandemic started, is to assign certain days for in-office meetings and collaboration, and remote days for work involving individual focus. Physical presence might be required for certain meetings, team-building and project kick-offs, but not necessarily for other focussed individual work. Richard McBarnet, Managing Director at Lumina Technologies states  “Here at Lumina we are trying to use home working days less for video and team meetings and more for the tasks that require concentration and focus. A task that may take several hours in the office can potentially be completed in just an hour or two at home”.

Wherever your team works though, it is extremely important to support everyone’s unique working situation and it is best to determine how your IT infrastructure and equipment helps bring your team together to allow for productivity every day.

What your employees want, is a seamless experience when working from home that is no different to that of being in the office, with access to the same business application and the ability to collaborate.

A hosted desktop solution can improve the efficiency of your IT system, with associated benefits to the way your staff work. The advantage to users is that they will barely notice that anything has changed at all. All users can log onto their desktops via an online portal, requiring just an internet connection. Integration of cloud-based identity providers (e.g. Microsoft Azure AD) enable features such as seamless single sign-on, passwordless login and multi-factor authentication. By enabling such integration provides an enhanced user experience by reducing (or preferably eliminating) password prompts and provides secure access to corporate data in an intelligent, non-intrusive manner. Staff will see and access exactly the same data in the same format they are used to, whether they are working on a computer, laptop, tablet or phone – and from wherever they are.

Prism Hosted Desktop is Lumina’s agile and flexible working solution. Developed with the needs of our client sectors, we have designed the product to fit seamlessly with your IT infrastructure. Our hosted desktop can securely deliver any workload to any device, anywhere – with no compromise to performance.

Prism Hosted Desktop is a scalable and affordable remote working solution enabling your business to offer agile working, in addition to dramatically reducing the time and cost of maintaining a physical desktop estate.  It enables an agile and flexible workforce who are not bound by location or device type.