For several months now, much of the world has transitioned to remote work. Where possible, knowledge workers have set up shop in home offices or kitchens or bedrooms, logging into virtual private networks and leaning on cloud services to keep business running uninterrupted.
While some countries are seeing workers tiptoe back to their cubicles, many teleworkers are staying firmly in place. For some companies, remote work may be a permanent new reality that addresses public health concerns while downsizing the cost of working out of expensive offices downtown.
On this week's WAN Manager Podcast, Greg is joined by Fiserv's Michael Wynston for a COVID-19 update on the impact of remote work on WAN managers.
Greg asks how Michael has been handling the remote and distributed workers that popped onto the WAN over the last few months and checks on how the network has been holding up.
Listen below for a full report on the WAN and working remote.
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Key Takeaways
Rapid and Significant Shift to Remote Work
The pandemic resulted in a large-scale, rapid transition of the workforce to remote or distributed work. Preliminary survey findings indicated that about two in five respondents reported an 80/20 split of remote and on-site workers, but notably, about one in five reported that 100% of their workforce was offsite during lockdowns.
This shift presented immediate challenges for companies like Fiserv, particularly due to the geographic distribution of their workforce and the diverse types of work being done, such as processing payments, manufacturing credit cards, printing statements, and operating call centers.
Transitioning roles like those in manufacturing or highly regulated environments like call centers was particularly challenging compared to knowledge workers.
Key WAN Pain Points and Technical Responses
The primary challenges faced by WAN managers due to the increase in distributed workers included managing congestion at gateways where sign-ons from remote users converged, and issues with employee broadband performance.
For Fiserv, the biggest infrastructure challenge was supporting their call center agents working from home, ensuring they had adequate broadband and connectivity through VPNs or SD-WAN. They found that public cloud providers and secure direct connections back to data centers were critical in distributing this workforce. While managing congestion and ensuring employee connection quality were issues, securing remote access was generally not cited as a significant difficulty for most respondents, suggesting existing security protocols were largely sufficient.
Companies also utilized edge networking footprints with network access points in various locations to allow users to reach resources more efficiently, even via the internet.
Impact on WAN Rollouts and Long-Term Strategy
The pandemic significantly impacted planned WAN projects, with approximately half of surveyed WAN managers delaying or cancelling rollouts. This could be due to vendors facing difficulties or restrictions on accessing physical sites like telephone closets. Supply chain challenges for network infrastructure and delays from telco providers in installing new circuits also extended project timelines.
Despite the immediate shift to remote work, turning off existing circuits wasn't feasible due to long-term contracts, typically three to five years.
However, the experience is expected to lead to more permanent changes, including a re-examination of real estate footprints and a move toward a hybrid workforce model.
Companies are continuing with SD-WAN migrations and evaluating opportunities to reduce the footprint of higher-cost MPLS connectivity in favor of broadband internet at offices that are expected to remain in use.
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
