The Best Technology for Working Remotely

While physical safety is top of mind for everyone these days, the current climate has also highlighted a need for businesses to provide the best technology for working remotely, as well as reliable, secure remote access.

Many businesses are in transition as provincial health mandates change and evolve the ways we work together, with almost 40% of Canadians working from home since March 2020. Telecommuting technology and work from home security solutions must be viewed through a longer-term, sustainable lens.

Here are some steps business owners can take to ensure their employees are working from home as efficiently and safely as possible.

Bring the Office to Them

Internal shared drives are some of the safest and most effective ways for employees to access collective projects and documents, but that kind of access is lost when employees are set up on their kitchen tables. VPNs and remote access bring the office home by creating a tunnel from your employees to your company server. This enables a smoother transition to longer-term telecommuting and maintains employee access to all the usual network services they need to do their jobs well. Smart Remote Office is a portable extended network that helps maintain business continuity by supporting and empowering remote workforces through secure VPN. Having access to all the same tools that are available in the office is an easy way to ensure employees safely and securely transition to remote work.

Protect Your Work From Anywhere

While Canadians are advised to stay at home for the time being, adaptation to remote work could mean working from anywhere in the future, and cafe WiFi isn’t secure enough for most office tasks. The portability of Smart Remote Office—small, lightweight hardware that needs only to be plugged in to function—brings with it enterprise-grade firewall protection. By directing all employee internet traffic through an encrypted server, data and documents remain protected no matter where your employees are set up for the day, using a secure remote log-in. Bundling the VPN with these security measures makes for a fast, effortless connection you don’t need to think twice about.

Stay Collaborative While Staying Apart

So much of what’s great about office culture is the spirit of collaboration, but that doesn’t need to be lost in the shuffle of telecommuting. Products like Microsoft 365 provide apps and tools to help coworkers engage with each other in real time on shared projects in a secure way. Microsoft Teams provides an in-house chat for quick messaging and information sharing, as well as a videoconferencing option without a 40-minute time limit. File hosting service OneDrive provides cloud storage so co-workers can share large files without taking up space on personal computers. And Sharepoint is a document management system that can be used company-wide to organize projects on the go. This kind of remote working technology has the capability to bring teams together even when they can’t brainstorm in person around a conference table.