This article was originally published in New Stack. More and more companies have gone remote with surprising benefits — a trend that has been building for years. A survey by Global Workplace Analytics and FlexJobs indicates that remote work has grown 91% over the last 10 years, and 159% over the last 15 years. The COVID-19 pandemic has elevated the relevance of remote work (including remote IT operations) to a new level.

Cybersecurity has always been an evolving challenge for IT teams—even before the pandemic and subsequent mass exodus to the home office. At the Protect & Streamline Summit for IT Leaders, experts from the IT and cybersecurity space came together to share advice for IT leaders scrambling to contend with a new set of business risks. Read on for key takeaways or access all session recordings for a deeper dive.

When the entire company is working from home, pair programming is not only possible but even more valuable. If you were practicing it face to face, why not continue remote? If you weren’t, why not try? My team did a series of remote pair programming sessions in during the last month or so, and I want to share a few tips from that experience. If you’ve never tried pair programming before, here’s a good primer.

2020 has been a year of challenges, and across all industries, companies are working hard and fast to remain efficient in the face of a new normal. Now that hiring freezes are slowly thawing out, many companies are starting to hire new people virtually and want to create remote cohesion between new and existing teammates. The lack of physical proximity means your team will need to ramp up on communication, transparency, and accountability.

IT teams face many visibility challenges due to the massive shift to remote work due to the Coronavirus outbreak. This includes the variability of home network environments, reliance on SaaS and cloud applications, the unpredictability of Internet transport, and higher congestion than ever before. How do you overcome these monitoring challenges?

Since we launched Splunk Remote Work Insights (RWI) in late March, we have been focused on helping our customers and the community understand how their workforce is staying connected, productive and engaged as we all continue to work across largely distributed teams.

Over the past several months, the world has changed as we know it. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the way many companies do business, with more virtual events, video calls, and curbside pickups than ever before. Although challenging at times—we miss attending live events and other social activities—this pandemic has forced many companies to think outside of the box. The traditional ways of doing business were no longer feasible or even legal in some cases.

Are you a remote worker, office worker, or both right now? What does your back-to-the-office look like? Will you still be a remote worker in July or September or January of 2021? If you have lost track of time, January 2021 is only six months away. There are many unknowns and in-betweens right now. Lots of questions, not many answers. How should your business prepare? The best way out is through as the saying goes—so, let's go through it.

As humans, it is common to find two tendencies when we work: Remote working began as a significant challenge. Many teams saw falling productivity and morale. Some people even declared it the end of ‘fixed working hours’ as we know it. As all of us started getting used to the concept, we started seeing solutions to alleviate, if not entirely eradicate the problems.

Remote work has become the new norm. Organizations are adapting to the current volatile market conditions by amending their business strategies, drafting new business playbooks, and laying down novel policies, all centered around one theme: remote work. This transition to remote work certainly hasn’t been easy and brings with it a unique set of challenges. Shifting business operations to remote environments profoundly impacts an organization’s IT infrastructure and in-house networks.