Those new too Home Working face a wave of new challenges.

Wrapped up in the cloak of isolation and endless video calls is the responsibility, to the business and its customers to deliver a secure and appropriate service but also to ones family, its privacy and Internet usage.

For employers meaningful employee feedback takes on increased importance and whilst the topic combines many diverse layers, this article focuses on the networking elements and in particular the new concept of extensible edge. How could technology originally design and priced to digitise legacy devices be utilised not only to vastly improve home worker IT services but offer a platform to form part of the wider employee engagement model.

The old way : I’m a robot, I weld things for a manufacturing company. My service engineer visits once a month, uploads fault data and sometimes refreshes my software.

The new way : I’m still a robot. I connect to a ruggedised Extensible Edge device which crafts a secure overlay across the manufacture’s LAN to my operations data centre. There, in real time they triage and upgrade, and rumour has it they run a digital twin to predict my failings. The edge talks many languages including mine and ensures only my traffic ever gets transmitted.

Home Edge

The concept of a completely cloud orchestrated container based affordable programmable device, capable of identifying and prioritising individual applications flows securely from a 3rd party LAN to a manufacturers operations centre radically alters the IoT landscape, but does this not also transfer to Home Working?

As a ex-sales person, business trips and hotel rooms equated to VPNs and showing my age even security dongles. Set-up was a pain, and when competing against all the other guest of that minuscule wifi bandwidth my VPN couldn’t tell a VoIP call from a Netflix movie…not that one ever watched Netflix on company time!

The old way : I’m a IT manager. All the staff are remote, I don’t control their private internet and scaling this VPN service is a nightmare. Hope Finance don’t see the bill. I’ve no idea what the users do, they just ring me up and complain about failing this and limited access to that. HR have been down, asking me why I don’t engage the staff more!!!!

New way: I send each employee an extensible edge. Plugs in, receive an email and initiates. I set profiles for each user group, crafting secure zero-trust application overlays to both public and private cloud services. I monitor all the apps, see trends, and failings and I can change application priority if their broadband isn’t as good as it should be, With HR we run review sessions, with the remote workers, ok its zoom not face-to-face, but we map their application concerns and hopefully make them feel more engaged. They can use the edge to segregate business and private traffic and they can see their own broadband performance. But that is just the start. Now we can download AI engines to the edge, so the business is working on how we can improve and expand the overall remote worker service.

www.infiot.com.