With the advent of remote and hybrid work, the line that separates work from personal life is increasingly hazier. This thinking applies especially to our digital lives. When work still revolved around fixed hours on-site, admins could easily determine which applications to block. For example, a worker should not be able to access the Netflix application at the office during business hours.

Prior to the pandemic, the notion of hybrid work was foreign and in most cases was for the “exceptional situation”. There used to be a small group of remote workers who weren’t near the office, and the road-warriors who were rarely in the office. On average though, working in the office was the norm. Beginning in 2020, there were headlines, articles, research, and statistics on how hybrid work is here to stay.

The abrupt transition to remote work that has occurred over the past few years has caused Microsoft Teams to become an indispensable application for many companies. As such, it is absolutely imperative to make sure that Teams users have a good experience, particularly with regard to call quality. Herein lies the problem. Although Microsoft has provided some rudimentary tools that can be used for user experience monitoring, those integrated tools are inadequate for enterprise use.

On August 31st 2022, Amit and Aditya shared a blog post discussing the Emergence of Cloud Desktops. This struck a chord for me because it tells the story of where we are, how we got here, and where we are going. End-user computing (EUC) is fast evolving with new inventions taking place often.

Working remotely has become the norm globally for businesses, specifically in regards to IT. Many companies have offices spread throughout the world, decentralized employees or contractors, or simply have a flexible work from home (WFH) policy. Remote work is an aspect of digital transformation that is often left out of conversations when it comes to ensuring business continuity and driving growth, despite research indicating that everything will continue to push towards hybrid work environments.

Monitoring IT infrastructure and services has always been an essential IT prerequisite. However, your IT monitoring system and security measures need to upgrade with an exponential increase in the number of remote users post-pandemic. For instance, consider this: At the end of a work day, you are notified that one of your critical services has gone down. But the problem is that five teams support different processes of that service.

Free and open-source apps for remote workers provide an alternative to costly and often less transparent commercial software. Many incredible free and open-source applications can significantly improve your remote work experience. Open-source applications are programs that you can run, modify, and redistribute for any purpose. Such applications are public, and everyone has access to their source code. These apps and software are commonly referred to as FOSS.

Work is no longer a place. It’s an activity that can and does happen anywhere. As such, it’s given rise to hybrid work, which combines the collaborative atmosphere offices provide with the perks of working remotely. This model gives employees flexibility in their workdays and better work-life balance. It also has the potential to positively affect diversity, equity, and inclusion, according to McKinsey.

The leap to remote work happened nearly overnight with the pandemic, and it’s clear that hybrid work and digital dexterity is the way of the future. As a result of this shift in the way we work, companies have invested in new technologies to adapt to the growing remote world, with 69% of companies planning to increase their investment in digital tools even more in 2022. Additionally, over 90% of businesses strive to implement hybrid work environments.