Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, recently mandated that remote employees have to relocate near central hub offices to improve productivity, or take voluntary resignation.

And while Amazon might be able to convince themselves that bringing their people back to work will improve productivity, data doesn’t lie. Extensive research done by Gartner about the future of work, shows

• There is a 40% increase in high performers when afforded flexibility over “where,” “when” and “how” they work.
• A whopping 55% of employees are high performers when provided radical flexibility over where, when and with whom they work versus 36% of those working 9 to 5 in the office.
• About 43% of employees and 47% of knowledge workers say they would seek other jobs if asked to come onsite.

My hypothesis is this: All the above challenges are not a “going back to a physical office space” problem for the industry or company leaders. After all, plenty of research concluded that working remotely increased productivity 13x.

Then what is the problem?

As the Gartner report demonstrates, remote work is here to say. It will take different forms, but it is the new world order. Plus, your vendors, collaborators, contractors will always be essential to company growth.

Therefore, the real problem to focus on here is how do you make it better for companies and their IT departments by extension to enable the remote workforce. How do you make it easier for your remote workforce to get the work done?

And, most importantly: How do we as an industry solve the problem of connecting the remote workforce: securely, quickly, and without compromising observability.

What About the Solutions That Exist Today?

There are solutions that you can deploy today, but the challenge is, no one solution connects your employees securely in seconds. Most are elaborate, cost-intensive, and effort-intensive. They add to the technical debt and complexities that IT teams are desperately trying to reduce. And more often than not, they need a super-specialized team to run and operate.

When the rest of the world has been able to go to no-code implementation mode for most solutions, we are still living in the 90’s when it comes to IT systems that connect the remote workforce.  

Legacy systems like VDIs need to integrate with other point solutions to actually connect the remote workforce securely to everything they need for work. So, you end up creating an IT administrator’s nightmare.

And the more sophisticated cyber security threats get, the more cumbersome your IT infrastructure becomes.

So, what do you do?

• Geographically restrict your access to talent, instead of just finding the best person for the job?
• Take weeks to onboard your employees?
• Keep deploying point solutions?
• Keep your technical debt by staying on legacy solutions and systems?
• Continue to increase cost, complexity, and maintenance nightmares?
• Continue to ship devices?
• Ignore the clear advantages of remote/hybrid work?

Marketplaces and HR teams have figured out how to hire from anywhere in the world, manage payrolls anywhere in the world, and the world hasn’t figured out how to make working from anywhere in the world a frictionless and secure experience?

Citrix and VMWare’s of the world introduced solutions that partially address the problem. There’s not one that solves remote working end-to-end for companies across the globe. So we did, and that was our “Why?”.

As the way the world works evolves, and cyber threats become more complex: the next evolution is “Seamless Employee Experience and Security in the Remote-first World” to empower both employers and employees to do their best work.

The Future

Now imagine this: you can get a fully cooked, super healthy, customized meal delivered to your door in 20 minutes. Notwithstanding your love for cooking, would you still choose to go to the market, pick up ingredients, and prepare it from scratch? And, when you have a million other things to prioritize and get done, do you spend the time and resources on it? Where is the sense in that?

So, we went about collecting a wish list of what IT leaders around the world want to get rid of:

• Cumbersome, expensive infrastructure for setups and maintenance
• Latency issues and internet connectivity dependencies
• Integration complexities
• Data security issues
• Hidden costs to address evolving new needs
• Setting up specialized teams to operate these systems
• Compatibility issues across operating systems, devices, and setups
• User experience discrepancies and complexities
• Employee privacy concerns
• Shipping devices
• Vendor lock-ins
• Security measures getting in the way of employees being able to work and deliver results

So what do employers, IT departments, CFOs, Ops Teams, and employees of today actually need?

• Secure remote access
• Observability
• Ease of onboarding and offboarding users
• Deployability in minutes
• Reduction in costs
• Reduction in setup complexity

And while building a product like that was no small feat, we did it. We built Sonet.io, a cloud-native solution that provides a browser-based workspace enabling employee engagement with their tools from any device with built-in security you need to access work while ensuring their privacy.

It works just like any other no-code SaaS solution, so operation and maintenance is a cakewalk. It has built-in, out-of-the-box features to set up access controls for proprietary data (read but don’t edit, copy, but can’t paste), and it secures your access to thick clients, web-based applications, desktop applications, and on-premise servers.

Your setup takes minutes, and you can onboard and offboard users in seconds. You integrate with any app you like, and don’t have to custom build anything. Plus, you don’t have to ship devices…

So, why would you settle for anything less?

As any scale-up CEO, I pay a lot of attention to what customers and users are saying. And recently, someone asked the Gartner Peer Community:

“If given a magic wand - what's the #1 daily business challenge you'd eliminate?”

And most people answered — user error (that causes security risks) and technical debt.

Well, we built the magic wand. 🙂

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