IT Necessities for a Distributed World

Chapter 1. The Modern Business Landscape

How the Pandemic Changed Work as We Know It

From the time computers first were introduced as business tools until the early 2000s, the operational norm was to host all networking infrastructure on company premises. In addition to on-premises equipment, companies purchased hardware-based tools and applications rather than using subscription-based services. This required everyone to work in close physical proximity to the IT resources they needed, tethered by a LAN, local WAN, or bandwidth-eating VPN and accessing resources from on-premises servers and devices.

The advent of cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) challenged these norms and created the possibility of a distributed world. However, the initial shift toward distributed environments was gradual and fraught with new challenges.

While the cloud and SaaS offered companies the ability to broaden resource and workplace accessibility, they also introduced new IT complexities and security risks. IT professionals needed to approach this technology carefully and intentionally to succeed with it. In the years following the introduction of cloud and SaaS into the business world, that’s what we saw: a slow progression toward a distributed environment.

The coronavirus pandemic catalyzed this migration, and human needs became the driving force behind the fast adoption of a distributed world. SaaS and cloud technology were the key supporting forces that facilitated the shift. Now, employee and employer benefits indicate that the shift is positioned to become permanent.

Implications for IT Teams

This new distributed world has significant implications on the IT-to-end-user relationship as well as infrastructure and technology; these implications call for IT teams to change how they operate and pivot to emerging solutions to meet these needs.

The IT/End-User Relationship

Just as companies used to operate fully on-premises, IT teams almost always operated in person before the pandemic. The business standard was that IT personnel were in the office or close enough to make an in-person visit upon request. When the world went remote, IT teams needed to figure out how to pivot their operations to continue serving their organization remotely.

The shift to remote had a ripple effect into many areas that created additional challenges for IT:

Increased demand from users

In a new, less regulated environment, more users need help, and more frequently. The variety and complexity of their requests also increased: users need help with everything from troubleshooting their WiFi connections to network hardware and configuration recommendations.

Despite some of these requests falling outside IT’s scope, allowing them to go unaddressed is an ultimate risk to the business’s bottom line. Thus, IT must handle higher demand while expanding their breadth of expertise and service.

Decreased IT efficiency

Like many other departments, many IT teams’ efficiency dropped when they first went remote. Each request took more time to complete than it did in person because they didn’t have the tools or processes to address them remotely, and IT employees faced a higher volume of more difficult tasks. IT teams need to adopt technology and practices that offset this productivity drop.

Infrastructure and Technology

When the workplace became distributed, IT needed to find a way to connect employees to the resources they needed, regardless of where they were working from. Access needed to be seamless, secure, and robust, extending to all the resources employees needed to be as productive as they were in the office.

This new level of accessibility called for changes to IT technology and infrastructure, namely:

Higher volume and complexity of application integration and automation

IT teams shifting to distributed environments face a steep learning curve in both the depth and breadth of integration and automation required to power resource access. SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) and SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) are key protocols in facilitating remote access. IT professionals need to know these inside and out to function within a distributed infrastructure.

Prioritized user experience

Technology needs to be accessible and user-friendly to both users and admins to empower the IT team and enable employees; otherwise, IT risks facing an ever stronger deluge of help desk tickets due to poor and confusing user experiences. In general, IT teams need to power end-user autonomy with self-service resources.

Emerging Solutions

IT teams have been innovating and working quickly to find ways to accommodate their newly distributed environments. While increasing headcount is sometimes part of the solution, SMEs are often working under more restrictive budgets. As such, some of the budget-friendly solutions that help address the challenges I outlined above include:

Integration and automation

Although integration and automation are necessary to power resource access, IT teams have found that they are also the secret to success in improving efficiency and revitalizing the IT/end-user relationship.

Some of the most critical instances of automation-solving for IT challenges include zero-touch deployment, just-in-time provisioning, and automatic deprovisioning, which I’ll detail further in Chapters 4 and 5.

Employee self-service

In addition to this emerging technology, companies are turning to end-users as solutions to growing issues through self-service. Now that employees are working unsupervised, IT teams are entrusting them with more basic IT functionality. Setting up one’s computer, for example, can be a self-guided exercise that only involves IT when someone runs into an issue. Self-guided application setups, troubleshooting documentation, and other self-service resources can help reduce the burden on IT.

Tip

Creating these resources and empowering employee autonomy require good process documentation and communication, which rely on a strong internal grasp of processes. Self-service documentation should also be updated regularly to avoid users needing IT help to address outdated instructions.

Identity-driven policies

With individuals trying to access resources from different locations and devices, IT needed to shift from IP- and perimeter-based security to identity-driven security. Policies that govern users with role-based permissions facilitate access to distributed resources and streamline the user experience. They also automate provisioning, authentication, and authorization, relieving IT of some of the burden of onboarding, tool-based permission configuration, and password lockout issues.

Unified, proactive telemetry systems

In a distributed environment, successful security requires both insights and proactive prevention that can accommodate the distributed infrastructure. Ideally, these insights should be administered across a unified network to provide thorough reporting on the people, devices, and activity across the distributed network. Further, proactive threat detection and intelligent activity reporting help prevent threats and alert IT teams to suspicious activity.

Cloud directory services

The key to achieving unified operations and insights is a cloud directory. While there are many cloud directory options available (detailed in Chapter 3), robust directories can manage identities, devices, networks, and access to cloud and on-prem resources (among many other functions). This breadth of service is well-suited to a distributed infrastructure due to its wide reach and ability to connect users to many different types of resources. Further, some cloud directory services include robust telemetry, which can help optimize costs.

Remote Work Permanence

Because employees were the driving force behind the shift to remote work, the benefits and satisfaction they enjoyed after doing so are clear indicators that remote work is becoming a permanent solution.

A Global Workplace Analytics study found that employees working from home half of the time saved an average of $600–$6,000 per year on personal expenses related to working outside the home such as the costs of commuting, parking, and food. Many studies have been published that demonstrate most workers also prefer remote work: 30% of the US workforce would not consider applying to a job without remote options, and 70% would take pay or benefits cuts to preserve their ability to work remotely. This sentiment is especially strong in the IT industry. While opinions can fluctuate over time, as of a 2021 study by Terminal, 83% of software engineers prefer remote work the majority of the time.

On the business side, distributed workforces enable you to hire from anywhere around the world, significantly widening the talent pool. In addition, remote workforces offer higher productivity, lower absenteeism and turnover, and savings on in-office space and overhead. The same Global Workplace Analytics study estimated that these benefits amounted to $11,000 of annual savings per hybrid-remote employee working from home 2.5 days per week.

In addition, the cloud’s explosive growth is an indicator that the business world is ready to support permanent remote work. The global IaaS market produced about US $12 billion in revenue in 2010 and is now expected to exceed US $623 billion in revenue in 2025, demonstrating a tremendous explosion in cloud adoption. Additionally, O’Reilly’s research from 2020 found that more than 88% of organizations use cloud services to some extent or another, and most respondents expected their cloud usage to grow in the next year. Further, in August of 2021, JumpCloud surveyed over 500 SMEs on their remote work plans in the face of the COVID-19 Delta variant and found that 70% of companies have extended their remote policies indefinitely, as shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. A recent JumpCloud survey of over 500 SMEs suggests that remote work is becoming a permanent business reality.

The sooner you embrace cloud services to support your distributed workforces, the better prepared you will be for possible future disruptions and changing workforce needs.