In today’s digital world, employees want flexibility to work outside the traditional constraints of the office. While more companies have begun accommodating remote workers, other companies have pulled back from allowing remote work. The best example of the latter being IBM who pulled the plug on remote work in May of this year which lead to many people leaving IBM. However on the other end of the spectrum, Automatic who owns WordPress closed some rather expensive real estate in San Fransisco because almost everyone worked remotely.
The fact is that remote work isn’t going away, a recent Oxford Economics study indicates that work now comes to you, and with you, wherever and whenever you decide. Mobile technology and new approaches to management are creating a new kind of digital workplace that can increase productivity, lower costs, and reduce stress. In other words, working remotely isn’t going away and companies need to embrace this trend. To better understand how companies can do just that, I had a conversation with Ching Mac of Citrix Canada to get his thoughts as this something that Citrix has been on the leading edge of for years.
According to Mr. Mac, what Citrix sees is that work is not about being in a 9 to 5 environment. It’s about getting stuff things done and that can between say 6 AM to Midnight wherever you happen to be with breaks in between to run an errand or something similar. He calls is work slicing which is an appropriate term from my perspective. It increases your productivity and people are a lot more happy.
For companies to successfully pull this off, they need a proper IT infrastructure to support that, along with a strong mobile work policy that is applied across the organization fairly. These are areas that Citrix can help an organization who wishes to roll out something like this as most of their workers are remote and they’ve been doing this for years successfully. I say that because they have proven solutions be it XenApp and XenDesktop or XenServer that can make this largely pain free for companies because it allows for a consistent user experience regardless of whether you use a iPad or a Windows 10 desktop while ensuring security for your organization. That’s important because the security needs of one organization are often different from another organization.
Finally, employers will have to adapt to this new reality. Mr. Mac’s advice is that there’s no point in fighting it. People do want this sort of flexibility and the millennial generation especially expect it. So be open to employees using the device of their choice from wherever they want to use it from. Just have the infrastructure and policies in place. At the end, it’s only going to help that employer get higher employee satisfaction and productivity from their workforce. Both of those are things that any company should want at the end of the day.
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Australia to Push for Greater Powers on Encrypted Messaging at “Five Eyes” Meeting
Posted in Commentary with tags Privacy on June 26, 2017 by itnerdThere’s a group of five nations that collaborate on collecting and sharing intelligence. Known as the “Five Eyes” they are the U.S., the U.K, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Australia at a meeting this week of the “Five Eyes” will push for greater international powers to thwart the use of encrypted messaging services by terrorists and criminals. Here’s what Reuters had to say on this:
Australia has made it clear it wants tech companies to do much more to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies access to encrypted communications.
“I will raise the need to address ongoing challenges posed by terrorists and criminals using encryption,” Australian Attorney General Senator Brandis said in a joint statement.
“These discussions will focus on the need to cooperate with service providers to ensure reasonable assistance is provided to law enforcement and security agencies.”
While I fully support any and all reasonable methods for law enforcement to stop “evil doers” from doing “evil things,” this isn’t going to accomplish that goal. Simply put, those who want to inflict chaos and destruction on the world will move to unregulated open source solutions with end to end encryption which will put them out of the reach of law enforcement. Thus the only thing that will be accomplished is the weakening of security consumer devices and software that “evil doers” will move away from to stay out of the reach of the good guys. Do I have a better idea? Short of putting some sort of “backdoor” into every device and software that has encryption, no. But I do know a bad idea when I see it. And this qualifies as a bad idea.
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