The way you work has changed suddenly and radically over the past months. Did you know that also drastically changed the way you use your IT infrastructure? And that your company is running a lot of new risk and has probably already lost a lot of productivity without even knowing it? Your Internet line for example made a huge promotion from important source of information to business critical communication channel for home workers.

Don't do things backwards

What if from now on you'd drive your car in reverse. The steering wheels would be on the other side of the car. Causing the car to swerve and causing you to bump into lots of things if you don't watch out. And you need to look over your shoulder constantly. And you can only use one gear instead of five or six. That's inefficient use of a car, because it was built to drive forwards mostly.

The large number of home workers let you use your IT infrastructure backwards. And your infrastructure wasn't built for that. Before the explosion of home workers information mainly went  from the outside (Internet) to the inside(your own network). Today information mainly flows from the inside (your own network) to the outside (your home workers, through Internet).

Different traffic requires a different approach

It's not just the direction of traffic, the quantities are much larger and the structure is different. Citrix/RDP traffic for example was used by an occasional home worker for secure access, it's now used massively. And that traffic is very sensitive, even a slight delay can cause the users screen to lock up for seconds at a time. When this happens the home worker can't do her job. Expanding your Citrix or terminal server farm doesn't fix this, neither does buying more bandwidth. And there are many other types of traffic that get disrupted by the change, such as video conferencing.

Risk is already manifesting

You're running a large risk that connections will falter, slow to a crawl and malfunction. Many of our customers are already seeing this happen. For home workers and employees that still come in to the office. A Citrix or Terminal Server session that locks up causes unnecessary delays that add up over a day. That's a lot of lost production. But a lot of irritation as well. Both are detrimental to the productivity of your employees.

Faltering video connections diminish the quality of your digital meetings ("can you repeat that, you dropped out for a moment"). The list of problems goes on. People rarely complain unless things stop working altogether. Which means you lose sight of just how much money you are losing through problems in your work at home environment.

Not everything is visible

Another reason why you lose sight of risk and problems. Your network or Internet provider measures your traffic every 5 minutes at most. Many problems occur on  a timescale smaller than 1 minute, a 5 second disruption is, well, disruptive for a user. That causes problems to average out in the measurement your supplier performs. A connection that's saturated for a shorter time will show a 20% load at most. Causing you to draw the incorrect conclusion that there's no problem. Measuring by the second is needed to have a good insight into the health of a modern infrastructure.

Measuring is knowing

To have eyeballs on the risk and problems caused by home working you need to measure. Measure on the level and in the time frame that it causes grief for your employees. Based on those measurements you can mitigate risk and solve problems.

Start today by knowing the risk you run and the problems already manifesting outside your field of view. Download our free white paper and get all the information you need about performance related risk.