Addressing the Remote Work Access Challenge.
The COVID-19 Pandemic, with the need to implement social distancing policies, has radically changed the way in which employees access applications and services needed to continue running the business.
However, the sudden transition from an office-based workforce to a geographically dispersed workforce has resulted in an explosion in internet traffic which is stressing the internet infrastructure as never before and exposing the poor way in which some applications cope with limited network availability.
Coping with Poor Home Networks
It is a fact that the home networks workers are now reliant on to access business systems are very rarely as strong or reliable as corporate networks. This is due to a multitude of reasons:
- Having to pay for their internet themselves, an employee’s domestic internet connection can vary from a powerful, dedicated fiber optic network connection, to older copper-based network connections, with speeds often falling below 10Mbps, and experiencing noticeable packet loss in the process
- The routers and hubs supplied by some low-cost ISPs are inefficient. While wired connections for these routers will be sufficient, the quality of the Wi-Fi connections most devices use can vary widely throughout the house, exacerbating the already poor quality of the network connections home workers are experiencing
- The employees will live in a variety of different locations, ranging from built-up cities with congested networks, to rural hamlets with rudimentary network infrastructure. While workers in urban environments could consider upgrading to higher bandwidth, but more expensive packages, in order to improve network performance, those in rural settings may simply not have such a choice.
Create a Realistic Remote Worker Test Environment
As a consequence, if your organization is planning to deploy commercial software, web applications, streaming media, VoIP services or any other application that is network-reliant, you can no longer rely on a company’s strong corporate network to be the only environment they will operate in. You will need to test how they will perform in different network conditions in order to ascertain whether your remote workers will have positive user experiences. This is where the NE-ONE Professional Software Defined Test Network comes into play.
NE-ONE positioned in a home working environment, testing user application experience.
If you would like to find out more about testing your Remote Access Infrastructure we would be happy to schedule an online demo. Just use the form below.