ILTA White Papers

Infrastructure Technologies

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www.iltanet.org Infrastructure Technologies 37 organization and reap the benefits of constant mobility requires that many organization processes, such as network performance, remote troubleshooting and bandwidth management are adapted to ensure they continue to operate optimally. For organizations with a high reliance on a distributed workforce, especially high-value distributed workers such as legal professionals, IT is often treated as fundamental to their organizational processes rather than being a "nice to have." MORE EMPLOYEES ARE WORKING OUTSIDE THE OFFICE Traditionally, most organizations have based their infrastructure around a network of buildings that house employees, but technology today allows a wider physical network of locations, including employees' homes, client premises and other third-party locations to be integrated seamlessly. One of the greatest influences in the way organizations have been run in the last two decades has been the ability to support remote employees. The effect has been either to better enable employees who were remote or to allow other employees to work more flexibly. The number of employees within branch offices has decreased because it has become more practical to manage workforces from afar. Many management functions, such as finance or technology, can be aggregated to centralized staff, maintaining just a core of necessary local professionals within the branch itself. TECHNOLOGY DEMANDS OF REMOTE AND BRANCH OFFICE USERS Remote management tasks do not need to be done from the main headquarters, although they often are. With good connectivity, they can be done from anywhere including at home, which makes working or providing support outside normal work hours more practical. For example, IT staff can carry out fixes when they occur and from wherever they happen to be, even applying patches on a remote worker's PC on the other side of the planet, if the network connection is good enough. There are a lot of benefits to running a highly distributed organization; but it must be done well, and the technology that supports it must always be available and reliable. Both organizations and employees suffer if the technology put in place to support a remote workforce does not deliver. Distributed organizations usually have three main areas for remote workers: those in branch offices, those who are mobile and the external partners, such as accountants, who have access to internal appliations and data. Trying to get a feel for how organizations support these three widely disparate groups of remote workers is a bit difficult because the answers tend to be wide-ranging. It's often the network infrastructure and the tools that have been put in place to manage both the network and the end user resources that determine the efficacy and ultimate success of remote workers. This includes the ease with which data can be shared between remote workers and the success of the widespread use of mobile devices, including mobile phones, laptop PCs and, more recently, smartphones and other handheld devices. Many remote workers accessing large amounts of information put a strain on the

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