Whether you are a remote worker or a member of an IT team supporting remote workers, there is no denying that the unprecedented transition to remote work has caused a surge trouble tickets to inundate many IT organizations. In fact, a recent NetMotion study shows that nearly 75% of organizations have seen an increase in support ticket requests from remote workers since the start of the lockdown. As workers spend more time outside the confines of the office, it makes sense that unforeseen problems arise. IT teams simply don’t have enough time to support the growth of remote work AND address the issues that have snowballed as a result.
Many of these trouble tickets go unresolved, especially when the IT team doesn’t have the tools to troubleshoot devices using independent networks outside the office. If working remote were just a temporary thing, it might make sense just to take a wait-and-see approach, but it’s not. As this problem grows, many companies are likely to turn to an Experience Monitoring solution to help reduce the number of tickets.
Troubleshooting in the dark
In September, NetMotion surveyed IT teams and remote workers living in the US and the UK. The study revealed that two-thirds of remote workers have encountered IT issues, but only half actually reported those issues to their IT team. Now, if times were normal, this shouldn’t be a significant issue as visibility is extremely accessible, given that most, if not all, devices remained inside the corporate perimeter. Typically the IT team could run simple diagnostics within their network, then push an update to solve and prevent additional issues. But as more and more devices stray outside the corporate network, visibility within external networks is critical to troubleshooting common IT issues. Simply put, if IT teams cannot see or understand what’s causing these problems, they will be unable to solve them.
Even after restrictions have been lifted, the office may become obsolete, and time spent in a traditional office setting may be significantly reduced. Meaning, IT teams need to solve said problems and proactively ensure that the remote working experience is as smooth and productive as if they are working in the office. And surprisingly enough, the remote working experiences may be significantly worse than IT teams believe. In the same study, both IT teams and remote workers were asked separately to rate the experience of working remotely. There was a 21% gap between what IT professionals ranked the remote experience compared with what remote workers actually felt.
What does the data tell us?
- Most IT teams are receiving a massive uptick of support tickets due to the transition to remote work
- On top of that, there are even more problems yet to be solved. But very little can be done without visibility and better reporting
- All of these problems are resulting in a worse and less productive remote working experience
Enter Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
NetMotion’s Digital Experience Monitoring tools are built into the platform’s existing VPN and zero trust capabilities. It allows IT teams to react to tickets much more intelligently with real-time, non-synthetic data on any network, device, application and more. Additionally, DEM empowers IT teams to do more proactive work and preemptively avoid problems and put policies in place that help protect employees while making them more productive. Improving the overall morale of end-users and IT teams, with fewer users ‘suffering in silence’ means less tickets and happier employees.
In the case of NetMotion, an endpoint agent can easily be deployed on all of an organization’s devices within a couple of hours, granting IT teams visibility and security without compromising end-user productivity.
“NetMotion is an ideal solution for the frontline workforce. The company’s mobile carrier and internet focus gives it a unique advantage in situations where employees aren’t connected to the corporate network, such as frontline and remote workers.”
The Forrester New Wave™: End-User Experience Management, Q4 2020
by Andrew Hewitt with Stephanie Balaouras, Shannon Fish, and Diane Lynch If you’d like to learn more about NetMotion’s DEM and how we’ve been helping organizations everywhere adapt to this new remote working world, check out this introduction to experience monitoring. Or, check out more information on why your organization needs both a VPN and an SDP with a DEM solution here.
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