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It is indeed critical to make the right infrastructure investments to support hybrid employees, and Cisco can help.

A Quick Look Back

Virtual workspaces for hybrid workers were thought of as mostly unnecessary when corporate workforces went to the office on a regular basis before March 2020. Only a minority of workers for most companies were remote on a full-time or most-of-the-time basis until then. But within a few weeks, remote workers became the majority around the world. Suddenly, the need for secure and collaborative virtual workspaces for them was top of mind for government leaders, corporate leaders, IT leaders, and end users. They all scrambled to figure out how to help ensure operational profitability and worker productivity and safety in an uncertain time with an unknown end-date.

Summer 2021 seemed to bring that end-date – or at least a tipping point – while also loosely marking the start-date of a new era with the Fall 2021 season now less than a month away.

Here We Go Again … Sort Of

It’s another disruptive moment in time. Work/life balance dynamics for many workers and their families have changed, as have their workspace habits and preferences. The companies they work for have adapted to all of it as well as they can so that employee job satisfaction stays positive. But now, just as IT organizations and workforces have grown accustomed to being efficient and productive under mostly remote work circumstances, companies around the world are resuming on-premises operations on at least a part-time basis for those remote workers who want or need to return to their offices. Not even a year and a half after remote work circumstances started.

The lessons IT organizations have learned about enabling workforce productivity while ensuring service performance and operational profitability will now be evaluated in a hybrid on-premises/remote model. This model will determine how much to adjust new protocols to satisfy not just cost efficiency and security needs, but also workforce morale and continued productivity and safety.

What’s Next, and How Can You Prepare?

Leadership from both IT and non-IT functions will need to embrace and champion whatever happens next. They will have to demonstrate unprecedented flexibility, patience, and empathy as changes in the deployment, usage, and management of data center infrastructure and user endpoints impact how employees get their work done. In fact, as illustrated in this Accelerating Hybrid Workspace Productivity infographic (downloadable version).

  • 60% of the total US workforce will be remote workers by 2024 (IDC, “Mobile Workers Will Be 60% of the Total U.S. Workforce by 2024”, September 2020)
  • 40% of governments worldwide will promote flexible working policies through 2022 (Gartner, Remote Workers Forecast, August 2020)
  • 72% of US executives are planning to invest in virtual collaboration tools to support hybrid workspaces (PwC, Remote Work Survey, January 2021)

Cisco and NVIDIA Can Help

Innovative solutions built with Cisco HyperFlex, Cisco UCS X-Series powered by Intersight, NVIDIA Virtual PC, and NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation can help organizations adapt to these evolving trends. They help raise the bar on the productivity and collaboration experience of flexible employees, ensure high application performance and availability with enterprise-grade manageability, and protect mission-critical assets and intellectual property from security threats.

Watch this 90-second video

Then visit acceleratedoutcomes.com to learn more.

 



Authors

Tom Baumgartner

Cisco Cloud Solutions Marketing

Enterprise Networking & Cloud Marketing