The digital workplace empowers rapid and scalable tools and solutions by improving productivity and communication throughout the company. More and more companies realize the business value of a managed digital workplace especially as today the urgency for a fully remote workforce is a reality.

To stay competitive, companies start shifting towards a digital workplace to keep the workforce content and ensure a sustainable business model. And so, with the migration towards an online environment accelerating, digital disruption can be a challenge for all businesses.

In this new paradigm, keeping the lights on is crucial. Digital leaders should understand the need to implement best practices and integrate tools and platforms required to enforce a digital working culture that can face unexpected disruption and overcome challenges.

5 ways to guarantee peace of mind with a managed digital workplace

1. Ensure flexibility with the Cloud

Collaboration and teamwork across multiple access platforms and multiple locations are a must in today’s working models. Downtime and data loss are now unacceptable disruption factors together with the aging software infrastructure, the lack of scalability and flexibility. Organizations embrace cloud models as an affordable way to meet requirements for mobility and rapid recovery of systems and data.

When it comes to flexibility, your organization can choose from different service models, including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, and can deploy software in the public, private or hybrid Cloud to meet their specific organizational security requirements and budgets.

Cloud also enables businesses to leverage software and storage that scales to meet their business and operational needs without having to worry about storage space, as is the case with on-premise software. Furthermore, Cloud hosted applications are enabling your organization and employees to be more flexible in their work practices as systems and real-time data can be accessed quickly and easily, anywhere.

In addition to flexibility and scalability, organizations can move core software applications to the cloud to better manage resources like costs and gain competitive advantages by having the freedom to focus on core business competencies rather than maintaining infrastructure.

2. Warrant Security Compliance

Phishing techniques and cyberattacks are ongoing issues in the online environment. Your top-of-line security software can be unprepared to address the security breaches that become more daring every day. Security is top of mind for every ongoing process in the digital workplace. Security compliance standards imply the safety of the employees and device and platform users, but also the management of data protection.

To make sure security issues don’t stand in the way of remote work, you must ensure that you can meet security requirements without compromising productivity or collaboration. Even in the cloud, sensitive data can be prone to risks. Techniques like Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) make sure that data is protected and safe.

Content governance is a further tactic that empowers self-service for employees and determine which sensitive content must be protected while it also helps ensuring accountability for data distribution. Working in a cloud-based CMS such as SharePoint, data and content governance is a must to keep the teamwork compliant with security standards.

Employees must understand what sensitive information is and how it should be used. Therefore, a lot of companies start using platforms like O365 that allow company-wide content to be broken down into categories like public, general or confidential. This will help teams in knowing exactly which kind of information they can share externally, internally, or just with named recipients. Sensitivity Labels in O365 are used for:

• Cross-platform and cross-device protection (encryption)

• Content markings: watermarks, header & footer

• Rights management: preventing printing

• Recommendations based on sensitive information

3. Manage data and devices company-wide

Advantages of the digital workplace such as cross-platform, cross-device access to documents and data and improved collaboration tools can also bring their own challenges along and need to be properly managed. As people can work remotely at any time, they should always have unlimited access to the sensitive information granted. This means that they might be able to download or share sensitive documents outside of the firewall’s coverage.

To implement governance for this kind of risks, you should put in place internal procedures that are accounted for. Organizations enforce requirements for container classifications and scans with DLP or reviews of site ownership and external memberships to better manage information that runs across the devices company wide.

If your company uses Cloud based platforms like Office 365 the data governance rules are available to people and services in the organization. To make sure data is used correctly across all devices, companies can enforce a label policy that helps to:

• Choose which users and groups see the labels

• Apply a default label to all new documents and email created by the users and groups included in the label policy

• Require a justification when changing a label

• Require users to apply a label to their email and documents

4. Use 24/7 Monitoring to keep the lights on

Constant monitoring of the IT Infrastructure is the way to ensure its proper function and availability. Companies start to understand and appreciate the importance of monitoring services, as their infrastructure and business-critical applications must be working correctly at any given time.

By disposing of 12-hour shifts, 24/7, 365 days per year for Monitoring, your business can make sure that the IT Infrastructure is working around the clock. This means there are experienced technical support engineers available to perform tasks or reports and to check that all applications work properly.

Downtime can seriously harm your business as applications must be kept up and running 24/7 to ensure business continuity. To avoid that, managing the digital workplace must be done based on a proactive approach rather than just fixing problems as they appear. It is crucial to perform backups of the entire IT environment regularly.

To prevent your business from any kind of outages, automated updates and regular backups are strategies that keep the peace of mind by preventing disruption factors. Analyzing failure patterns across platforms and processes show what areas should be subdued to customer and service improvement.

5. Plan on the long run and engage in long-term partnerships

Planning on the long term prevents issues from arising when the worst-case scenario unfolds. As you start strategizing, a trusted IT partner can help you customize your plan and check that you have the flexibility to scale your resources. You should make sure that security tools have been properly configured, data backups work and no gaps exist in your security strategy.

To preserve future flexibility, have a look at IT partners that possess the capabilities to assist you on the long run. Search for a consultant that offers a vast suite of managed services, from infrastructure and application management to 24/7 monitoring and support, alongside with other IT services that can be aligned with your mid-term and long-term strategy. A trustworthy IT partner should be adaptable and flexible in doing business with you and willing to scale resources to assist your needs and ensure company growth.

Final thought

With a managed digital workplace, your business will be ready to face challenges if ever disaster strikes. Not only will you have tools in place to limit the damage, but, alongside a trusted partner, you will also be provided with a digital environment you can rely on before, during and after any incident.