As more businesses realize the benefits of hybrid work, including increased productivity and a better quality of life for employees, many are still struggling to find the right technology solutions to support their work-from-anywhere employees effectively. If your company lacks the necessary tools to keep your employees connected and communicating efficiently – no matter where they’re located – you’re likely suffering from a rise in employee frustration and unsatisfied customers.
By matching the right network solutions with the most pressing hybrid work challenges, your company can enjoy a happier, more productive workforce – without having to make expensive infrastructure changes. In this blog, we’ll go over a few of the most common hybrid work challenges businesses face today, as well as the technology solutions that solve them.
Common Hybrid Work Challenges
With 72% of organizations offering hybrid work schedules ,1 it’s clear that this flexible way of work isn’t going anywhere. But despite its many benefits, hybrid work isn’t without its challenges. Here are a few common hybrid work challenges plaguing businesses today:
Unreliable Connectivity
Many work-from-anywhere employees aren’t offered the same quality of network connectivity as their in-office counterparts. Frequent system outages or laggy, slow Internet can prevent your employees from accessing mission-critical data and applications, reducing productivity and impacting the customer experience. Soft phones solve lagging connectivity issues by giving remote workers the ability to access the phone system from almost any tablet, laptop, or desktop.
Poor Communication and Collaboration
If your off-site staff isn’t connected with those in the office, you’ll inevitably encounter communication silos, data disparities, and knowledge loss. This may happen if your remote and in-office phone systems are separate or if your current communications platform doesn’t provide real-time messaging, video conferencing, and other tools your geographically dispersed staff needs to communicate and collaborate effectively.
Increased Cyber Threats
As if rising cyber threats alone weren’t enough cause for concern, a study found that businesses lose $1 million more in data breach costs where remote staff are a factor in the breach.2 While a lack of proper security training can increase the risk of data breaches, outdated technology and improperly-secured personal devices are driving factors behind making hybrid workers a prime target for cyber criminals.
Data Storage Demands
A big part of providing proper hybrid work support is ensuring your network infrastructure can meet growing data requirements. Different cloud platforms demand different bandwidth and computing demands, and businesses must increase their data storage capacity to meet these demands. Unfortunately, increasing storage capacity in an on-prem data center can be costly and complicated, which may hold you back from investing in technology solutions that can help your company grow.
Solve Hybrid Work Challenges With These Network Solutions
Overcoming these challenges isn’t impossible – or even difficult, in many cases. Here are a few solutions that can solve your hybrid work challenges and equip your geographically-dispersed workforce with the connectivity, reliability, and cloud-based tools they need to work efficiently.
High-Speed Internet
Slow, unreliable Internet is one of the biggest offenders behind many off-site work issues. If your business network frequently experiences unplanned downtime or doesn’t support your increased bandwidth needs, your hybrid workforce is already set up for failure.
PS Lightwave’s fiber Internet leverages more than 5,500 fiber route miles in the Greater Houston Area. Our widespread network delivers high speeds, built-in reliability, and full-duplex bandwidth for consistent performance that meets your bandwidth demands. Plus, it’s capable of bursting up to a higher bandwidth for a boost in speed when your network needs it, allowing your teams to share large files, make video calls, and more without interruption.
Remote workers can also log in to your network utilizing VLANs, which enables network operators to partition their networks to meet security and functionality requirements while enabling employees to work from anywhere.
VoIP and Hosted PBX
When your employees aren’t all in the same place at once, providing tools to help them communicate and collaborate quickly and easily is critical. PS Lightwave offers VoIP and hosted PBX solutions that let you connect geographically-dispersed employees and devices on one unified phone system that integrates voice, video, instant messaging, and email into a single, user-friendly platform.
Because you’re not purchasing an expensive on-site phone system, hosted PBX keeps your up-front investment affordable. Plus, it scales as you grow your business, with new capabilities continually added and improved upon from the cloud, so upgrading your solution with new lines or added functionality is never difficult.
Data Centers
Outsourcing your server needs to a reliable data center is the safest, quickest way to boost your network security and data storage capacity. PS Lightwave owns and operates a 12,000 square foot data center conveniently located in central Houston and connected with redundant fiber paths to all major data centers in the Greater Houston Area.
Our LightHouse data center provides redundant power, cooling, and connectivity to support your physical hardware and hybrid solutions with any of the major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and others. And with 99.999%+ power availability and expert staff on-site 24/7/365 to monitor for outages, your risk of downtime is dramatically reduced.
Boost Your Hybrid Connectivity With PS Lightwave
At PS Lightwave, we know what it takes to make hybrid work successful because we’re a hybrid team as well. Along with providing cutting-edge technology solutions and expert local support, we also pride ourselves on continually improving our customer service. Count on PS Lightwave for the following benefits and more:
- On-time delivery, which we measure as part of our commitment to our customers.
- Greater network resiliency thanks to our switched Layer-2 infrastructure with 100+ data rings for added redundancy.
- Customized solutions tailored to meet your needs and scale as your business grows.
- Responsive support with 24/7/365 monitoring to ensure your network stays connected around the clock.
Contact PS Lightwave today if you’re ready for custom network solutions that deliver better connectivity, reliability, and security to solve your hybrid workforce challenges.
