Network Flex By Jeff Li & Karen Falcone Building flexible and agile networks for the changed workplace With uncertainties surrounding the number of employees working remotely, in-office, or a mix of both, coupled with market downturns and labor shortages, organizations and their service partners must be agile and prepared for constantly shifting workplace and office dynamics. Even with a majority of offices re-opened, remote work will always be present in some capacity. In fact, recent articles and research about the availability of office real estate in major cities indicate that there will continue to be diverse types of working arrangements for years to come. A crucial aspect of success for the service providers tasked with managing these situations will be building networks that are strong enough to support remote work, capable of handling sudden increases in bandwidth demands on the days when an office is fully operational, or that can even handle an entire business being run via the cloud. The days of a single office or at most a few offices in different cities needing to be managed are long gone. Regardless of what “the office” looks like on a daily basis, it is important that service providers ensure that customer networks can support the demands of all potential scenarios – while delivering an exceptional user experience. The end user, or employee, experience is the measuring stick for success no matter how large, small or remote a company’s workforce is. To effectively support today’s varied working models, service providers must prioritize network flexibility for their customers. There are elevated expectations among customers that their network is always working at a high level and their cloud services never experience downtime. While this isn’t realistic, the point is that the experience end users CONTROL 36 CHANNELVISION | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2024
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