Are You Enabling a Resilient Workplace?

For most organisations, a remote/hybrid workforce is here to stay

Aberdeen’s 2024 Future of the Workplace study found that today’s IT professionals are challenged to provide a larger number of remote / hybrid users with a faster, personalised level of support, in a more complex and dynamic computing environment with increased cybersecurity- and compliance-related risks.

Pre-pandemic, the business workforce skewed strongly towards mostly or entirely on-site — and post-pandemic, on-site workforce policies have been rebounding. Even so, Aberdeen’s benchmark research projects that 4 out of 5 organisations will continue supporting some degree of remote / hybrid workforce for the longer term (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Post-pandemic, on-site workplace policies have been rebounding — but for 4 out of 5 organisations, at least some degree of remote / hybrid workforce is here to stay

Source: Aberdeen, May 2024

As a simplified view of how the workplace has evolved over just the last few years, Figure 1 also incorporates a net workplace index — inspired by the well-known net promotor score (NPS) — in which +100% means that all respondents are entirely or mostly on-site, -100% means that all respondents are entirely or mostly remote, and values of +50% and higher or -50% and lower are generally considered indicators of a strong trend. In this context, the sharp and sudden shift from +42.7% to -7.9% underscores the unprecedented impact of the global pandemic on the modern workplace. Post-pandemic, this index returned to a “new normal” range of +12.9% to +14.9%. Looking forward, however, the future of the workplace is only slightly skewed towards on-site (+6.7%). Said another way: For most organisations, a remote / hybrid workforce is projected to be here to stay.

Aberdeen’s research findings are consistent with empirical tracking of the return-to-office policies of the largest companies, in which 77 of the Fortune 100 continue to support at least some degree of remote / hybrid workforce (Source:  https://buildremote.co/companies/return-to-office/#statistics, May 2024). 

Pragmatically, this means that the technologies and capabilities initially put into place on an “emergency” basis in H1 2020 need to be revisited with an eye toward a more planful and experience-based approach to supporting a highly productive, highly resilient workforce in the future. 

We can see this happening now. Updated strategies and investments in support of a resilient, remote / hybrid workforce are increasingly being featured in management communications about strategy, operations, and financial condition — as in the example of Vodafone’s 2024 Annual Report, which notes that “the shift to hybrid working has redefined the role of the office and inspired us to create a new global office design primarily for collaboration and connection.”
 

How Zscaler drives resilience in hybrid and remote workforces

The Zscaler platform leverages Zero Trust Architecture and operational excellence to offer continuously high availability and serviceability. Customer-controlled disaster recovery capabilities and robust failover options are designed to help you stay operational even during unplanned application outages.

To dive deeper into how Zscaler helps organizations transition from legacy network infrastructure to modern, secure, and resilient cloud-native services, watch this podcast-style conversation between Derek Brink, Vice President and Research Fellow at Aberdeen Group and Kevin Schwarz, Head of CTO from Zscaler as they discuss key technology trends shaping the future of IT. Watch now to learn how Zscaler's zero trust approach supports a future-proof, resilient workplace.