Your office is at home, but is your network ready?

Submitted by Eileen Haggerty, NetScout's Director of Product Marketing

I was reading Internet Telephony e-news today and the article on remote workers caught my attention:

Survey results indicate that 45 percent of U.S. workers sometimes work remotely, and at first I was surprised it wasn’t higher because everyone in my marketing and product management groups have been known to work from home if they needed to for one reason or another – illness (theirs or a child’s), contractor coming to the house, car trouble, reduction in interruptions to complete a job – you get the idea. 

But then I thought about the number of jobs that require physical presence in the office, or manufacturing plant, or retail store – after all, you can’t check out customers from home or build a car from home.  In fact, one of my colleagues from another company was infuriated last winter when one of her employees called in on a particularly bad snow day to say she was going to work from home– she was the lobby receptionist and phone operator – with a chuckle, I agreed it would be difficult to greet customers from home.

All that said, this evolution of the workforce being able to work from home or being expected to work from a virtual office (I know semantics), masks an enormous build out in infrastructure, both broadband access to homes – cable or service providers for high speed access and high volume voice/data transport – as well as on the part of corporations to accommodate individual remote access via secure protected mechanisms, e.g. VPN access.

There is an underlying expectation of this remote workforce – similar network performance remotely as they have when in their office. This requires vigilant network and application performance management, the likes of which NetScout provides to both enterprises and service providers to help detect and diagnose degradations so they can be restored to optimal performance rapidly.

We want to know – do you work remotely?  Does your company endorse occasional work from home situations?  Do they have a significant proportion of the company working from home on a regular basis?  Did the price of gas this summer change your company’s position on working remotely?  Let us know what your experience has been.