Will Your Employees Return To The Office Any Time Soon?

It was not supposed to be that way. That way being uncertain when we know to return to the office or who will work from home permanently. Sure, we all embraced the notion of hybrid workplaces, and businesses made plans for when and how to return to the office and support employees who will work remotely. And now, the Delta variant showed us that the best plan is to plan for flexibility. The entertainment industry has its famous saying that the show must go on yet is forced to either cancel or postpone events. And I think I speak for most if not all of us that we looked forward to more in-person events and industry exhibitions, but we are back to virtual events, i.e., Gartner’s conference calendar for the rest of 2021.

Speaking of Gartner, a recent press release informed that a Gartner Survey Reveals a 44% Rise in Workers’ Use of Collaboration Tools Since 2019.

Figure 1: Changes in Digital Workplace Technology Use, 2019-2021 (Percentage of Respondents)

UCaaS and a Superior User Experience

Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Fuze, and all other UCaaS solutions are here to stay, and let’s be honest – you would start missing them, wouldn’t you? Nobody will miss (and I have not done extensive research here, but I am pretty sure of it) dropped connections, latency-induced funny faces, and silent voices though no one is on mute (for once). In short: a lousy application performance leads to a bad user experience, which in return drops employee productivity.

As I wrote in one of my previous blogs, we care about all three and take the user experience seriously: Less Talk, More Action: The Importance of the Customer Experience Part 1 and Part 2 are here and here.

And we care deeply about providing our customers the best possible application performance for any user, anytime and anywhere. And in this, we also know that actions speak louder than words. UCaaS applications get a first-class treatment on the Aryaka Cloud-First WAN. We recognize and mark UCaaS traffic, steer it optimally and dynamically across internet access links and through the core infrastructure, minimize packet loss and latency, thereby delivering an optimized user experience.

My colleagues Paul Liesenberg and Danny Rodriguez showcase how we do it in this WAN Wednesday demo webinar: Delivering on Superior UCaaS Performance with Aryaka’s Cloud-First WAN.

We treat all UCaaS applications equally well. Enterprises have their preferences  (and we are agnostic to which ones make you look and sound better) but for more information on specific solutions, check out the Solution Briefs at the bottom of this blog.

Ensure Performance, Flexibility, and Security for Your Hybrid Workplace

I talked about the importance of the customer experience and the importance of flexibility. This is where we help enterprises with our Hybrid Workplace solution. A key element is the Aryaka Private Access solution. Our flexible managed VPN as-a-service that we introduced nine months ago has seen rapid adoption, being used by customers to connect thousands of remote employees. It has met a customer’s need. It is part of our Cloud-First WAN, fully integrated across all our PoPs, white-glove service managed, and it does what we set out for it to do, as Richard Delisser, SVP of Land Technology & Global Infrastructure at our customer World Fuel Services, noted:

“Aryaka’s Cloud-First WAN keeps our team more productive and better connected than ever. We’re confident our global teams are experiencing secure and reliable application performance no matter where they are, what device they’re using, or how they access our technology services.”

Where do we go from here?

Nobody knows if Delta is the last variant we have to worry about or not. And when and if the current plans to return to the office in 2022 will materialize or not. What is clear, though: We will continue to deliver predictable, guaranteed application performance with the most comprehensive SLAs in the industry and ensure real uptime. So, one thing less to worry about with our worry-free services. And we will continue to work on our integration of the Secucloud technology for converged networking and network security-as-a-service as a managed SASE solution.

The only constant is constant change, so while it’s good to plan, but also plan to stay flexible. We can help enterprises here with our managed services. They are built to be just that, no matter how you choose to collaborate.

More Information
Blog: Why we acquired Secucloud, and what does it mean for our customers?
Webpage: Hybrid Workplace solution
Solution Brief: Fuze | Microsoft Teams | 8×8 | Zoom | Cisco Webex
Webinar: Fuze and Aryaka: Powering high-quality UCaaS with NaaS