Remote work is no longer the temporary arrangement that many people expected it to be when the pandemic began. It’s here to stay for the foreseeable future, and companies must adapt by embracing remote work trends that will keep their workers productive and happy — whether they are in the office working on remote desktops part of the time or not at all.

With that need in mind, here’s a list of the top remote-work trends for 2021 that companies should consider as they prepare for a future in which significant numbers of employees work remotely on a permanent basis.

Optimizing the remote-employee experience

When remote work seemed like a temporary arrangement, most companies put relatively little thought into the employee experience, meaning how employees thought and felt about working from home.

They didn’t invest in collaboration technologies, such as remote desktops, that would help employees feel connected to the rest of the organization while working in isolation. Nor did most companies deploy tools that provide a frustration-free experience for connecting to IT resources from out of the office. At best, they gave their employees software like a Windows RDP client so they could log into their company workstations from home.

As it has become clear that many employees will be working remotely for the foreseeable future, companies have begun investing more heavily in activities like virtual coffee breaks, which can help employees collaborate and engage with each other. They have also implemented more user-friendly technologies, such as cloud remote desktop servers, which make it easier for employees to access the applications and data they need to do their jobs, no matter where they are located.

Securing remote IT assets

A number of new security challenges emerge when workers are connecting remotely on Windows Remote Desktops. Networks become more difficult to secure because they need to support users and devices connecting from beyond the firewall. Data is at higher risk of being downloaded by employees to local devices that are not physically secure. Even phishing emails can be harder to detect.

Indeed, according to one study, 20 percent of organizations have suffered a security breach since the start of the pandemic that was facilitated by remote workers.

This means that, going forward, it will become critical to secure the remote desktop infrastructure and software that employees use to work remotely. Centralizing desktop environments in the cloud is one way to do this. When workstations run virtually inside secure cloud environments, data and applications never have to leave the cloud, which significantly reduces exposure to potential attack.

Supporting peripheral devices

When employees work remotely temporarily, being able to connect their company-owned IT environments to devices like printers and scanners is not usually a top priority. They can wait until they’re back in the office to print documents. Or they can print a few on their personal equipment at home.

But when employees work remotely regularly, these ad hoc approaches don’t work. Workers need a seamless way to integrate devices in their at-home work environment with in-office servers, file shares and other resources their company owns.

This can be done, but it requires solutions tailored-made for this purpose. As companies prepare to support remote workers permanently, factoring in the need to integrate with peripheral devices will be a priority.

Maintaining IT hardware

Keeping IT hardware up and running also becomes more challenging when remote work is permanent. Employees may be able to get by with laptops that need maintenance when they’re working from home temporarily. But when they rarely or never go into the office, providing support for physical hardware is much more difficult.

One way to cope with this challenge is to minimize the amount of physical hardware that companies need to maintain. Here again, cloud desktops can help by allowing organizations to provide employees with a complete remote desktop environment that they can access from anywhere using their own hardware. And because the only resource required to log into the cloud desktop is a Web browser, there is no special hardware or software that the company needs to deploy and maintain on employees’ personal devices to keep them productive.

Keeping costs in check

The cost of supplying remote workers with the equipment they need to work effectively from anywhere can rise quickly, especially if companies try to recreate the IT infrastructure of the office within each employee’s home. When they do that, employees sometimes require high-powered desktops or laptops, routers and perhaps even UPS units to keep their devices running.

A simpler — and less costly — approach is to host desktop environments in the cloud, which don’t fail when the power goes off or the router goes down, and which can be configured to provide whichever resource allocations employees need. When employees are assigned cloud desktops, they can access their workstations from any location and device, without depending on special (or expensive) equipment.

Facts about Remote Working

Here are some interesting facts about remote working:

Workplace autonomy is highly preferable among job seekers

For some employees, working remotely and sharing files via remote desktops has been a blessing in disguise. In fact, a study reveals that workplace flexibility is the primary reason behind employees accepting new jobs.

Therefore, businesses must remember that when candidates decide between job offers with similar payrolls, the scales tilt more toward the one that allows for flexible working.

Remote working benefits the ecology

Logging into windows desktop servers to collaborate with colleagues can lead to significant environmental sustainability gains. Remote working remarkably shrinks the need for a regular commute as employees can simply work on projects through remote desktops. For instance, home working four days/week could trim nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions by about a tenth.

The love for remote working will continue

Remote working has become the new normal, and as things settle down, employees have built new habits and preferences. Not only is “work from anywhere” popular, but several employees want to remain location independent for most of the work week.

About 9 out of 10 employees opt for accessing remote desktop servers from their homes, opines a survey. Of them, 45% prefer functioning in a fully remote work setting, while a slightly lesser percentage choose the hybrid work model.

Conclusion: Keeping remote employees productive and happy

If 2020 introduced many employees to remote work for the first time, 2021 is the year when companies realized that remote work would continue indefinitely for many of their employees. To thrive in this environment, organizations must provide employees with the tools they need to work efficiently from anywhere, while also addressing the security and cost challenges associated with remote work.

FAQS

What are the most in-demand remote jobs?

These remote jobs will see drastic demand in 2022 and beyond:

• Digital marketer: Build brand awareness and generate leads using organizations’ websites and social media platforms
• Web/software developer: Plan and develop device- and browser-friendly websites and applications
• Data scientist: Extract meaningful insights from data using advanced analytics methods, including predictive modeling and machine learning (ML), and help enhance decision-making
• UX designer: Make products or services that fulfill businesses’ needs and boost overall user experience
• Cybersecurity analyst: Safeguard mission-critical resources, such as data, systems, and servers, from malicious online attacks

What is the trend of working from home?

When COVID-19 prompted sudden workplace shutdowns, organizations slipped into the spontaneous experiment of working from home. Cut to the present, companies have established new working protocols that acknowledge flexible work as a lingering aspect of the modern working realm instead of a temporary pandemic response.

Offering employees the option to work from home helps businesses achieve economies of scale. Inflation reaching new highs means a gradual rise in the cost of goods and services. Hence, encouraging location-neutral workforces is a win-win for both employers and employees.

Further, remote work helps companies looking to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) achieve a truly diverse and global workforce.

Which field has the most remote jobs?

At present, technology-related companies are offering the highest number of remote working opportunities. Tech workforces already had the infrastructure and skills to switch to remote work when COVID-19 struck worldwide. Moreover, ongoing advances in remote desktop as a service (DaaS) are encouraging companies to connect to their employees, no matter where they are.

Within the technology industry, cloud engineers, database architects, and salesforce developers represent a major portion of the remote workforce. Eliminating geographical curbs on human capital – and thus optimizing its productivity – will help organizations capture the value at stake.

The healthcare and education sectors also are catching up when it comes to expanding remote workforces.

Is remote working the future of work?

Remote working is an incredible option if companies allow it; however, it does not necessarily suit everybody. The pandemic-spurred work protocol poses two oft-cited concerns questioning its effectiveness. First is the lack of the close-knit environment that traditional workplaces offer. The other is the potential productivity slump as employees have to juggle distractions throughout the working hours.

Given these reasons, several C-level executives reckon that returning to office cubicles makes employees more efficient, eliminates communication loopholes, and promotes a more positive work setting.

As businesses unfold the future of work, the answer lies in hybrid work, where employees can live across regions but participate in face-to-face activities on a semi-normal basis.

What is the highest-paying remote job?

Software engineers/developers mint the most money while working remotely. They are responsible for building applications, websites, and software for businesses’ specific use cases. With proficiency in programming languages like JavaScript, Ruby, and Python, Software engineers keep pace with the evolving demands of the flourishing tech industry by building the front and back ends of the user experience online.

Product managers follow software engineers in terms of highest-paying remote jobs. The primary credit for their high demand goes to the rise in multiple digital product and project development journeys. In addition, product managers manage the entire development workflow: building strategies, creating blueprints, and researching the markets.

Can remote working replace offices?

Remote working, no doubt, brings scads of benefits with them. As people access their smartphones, tablets, and laptops, they can collaborate with their colleagues through video-conferencing tools and complete their work from home itself.

Earlier, even for brief catch-ups or menial tasks which are doable on any Internet-enabled device, people had to travel to their workplaces. However, with better technology at their disposal, including cloud desktop services, they have the luxury to complete tasks from home.

Nevertheless, remote working cannot replace traditional offices. The emerging work culture gels well only with industries, including technology, marketing, and human resources. On the other side, in jobs where doing field work and networking with others is essential – government, real estate, and automobile – remote working can never replace physical offices.

One year ago, only a tiny fraction of employees worked from home on a regular basis. Today, thanks to the pandemic, working from home has gone mainstream, and there is plenty of evidence that the trend is here to stay. Companies of all sizes and across all industries have learned that employees who work from home are not merely able to do their jobs, but actually tend to be more productive. Remote workers also save companies as much as $10,000 per employee annually in real estate costs and make it easier to attract top talent by eliminating the need for new hires to relocate.

Yet despite all of the benefits that remote work offers to companies, it also presents challenges. Over the next year or two, companies’ ability to adapt effectively to the technological, security and regulatory roadblocks that can get in the way of an effective work-from-home strategy will determine which firms are the winners and which the losers in the distributed-workforce landscape.

With that reality in mind, here’s an overview of what companies should be doing to ensure that they are ready to take full advantage of the work-from-home trend.

Why work from home is here to stay

Early in the pandemic, it was easy to assume that the pivot to remote work was just a temporary trend, and that most workers would return to the office soon enough.

The past half-year, however, has demonstrated a different reality. Now, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a large number of workers will continue to work from home, at least part of the time, even after the pandemic recedes into memory.

A University of Chicago report predicts that employees will spend more than one-fifth of their work days working from home after the pandemic ends. Likewise, Gartner believes that nearly half of employees will work remotely at least on a part-time basis post-pandemic. And managers report much less concern about allowing employees to work remotely than they did before the pandemic, suggesting that the C-suite won’t be looking to thwart the ambitions of the more than 90 percent of employees who express a desire to work remotely.

What could get in the way of widespread remote work for some companies, however, is failure to implement the technologies, security protections and compliance solutions necessary to ensure that employees can work effectively from home on a permanent basis.

Work-from-home technology challenges

Perhaps the most obvious challenge for supporting ongoing remote work is ensuring that employees have the technology they need to do their jobs remotely.

It can be easy to underestimate this difficulty. Many companies have long had remote-work solutions like VPNs and Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in place, which allow employees to connect to on-site IT infrastructure while working from home.

The challenge companies are likely to face, however, is that these technologies are insufficient in many cases for full-fledged working from home. It’s one thing to let your employees use a VPN to log in and check email once in a while. It’s another when the majority of your employees are logged in remotely to data-intensive apps all day, overwhelming your VPN server and bringing network connectivity to a crawl.

Along similar lines, employees who work remotely on a frequent basis need to figure out ways to connect peripheral devices like printers that they use at home to the remote workstations they use when connecting from off-site. This can be done using technologies like a VPN, but setting it up is far above the paygrade of the typical employee. Unless workers understand how to configure things like split tunneling and manual routing tables on their home networks, connecting a local printer to a remote VPN is not very feasible.

Fortunately, technologies exist that can radically simplify these headaches. Chief among them are cloud desktops, which allow businesses to replace VPNs and RDP clients with cloud-based virtual desktops that employees can access from anywhere. Many modern cloud desktop solutions also integrate seamlessly with local printers and other devices without requiring complex setup on the part of users.

Securing remote workstations

Another challenge that can be easy to underestimate is ensuring that data and applications remain secure when employees work remotely on a massive scale.

Here again, it’s one thing when employees log in from off-site occasionally to perform basic tasks like checking email. It’s another when they are logged into the company network permanently from at-home devices and networks that may not be secure, and that are impossible for employers to monitor for vulnerabilities or insecure configurations.

Cloud desktops offer a solution to these challenges as well by making it possible to build virtual desktop environments that are completely segmented from whichever at-home devices and networks employees use to connect. With cloud desktops, it doesn’t matter if employees log in from malware-riddled personal computers. The desktops run in isolated virtual machines, essentially eliminating the risk that security problems on personal devices could spillover to company desktops.

Compliance difficulties

Although no major regulatory framework explicitly forbids working from home, many major laws, like HIPAA and the GDPR, include rules related to securing physical access to private data. That becomes much harder to do when employees are downloading sensitive information to their personal devices, or installing business applications directly on them, in order to work from home. Even performing security audits, which is a requirement of regulatory laws like the CPRA, becomes a major challenge if employees are working from home and their desktop environments can’t be reliably monitored from a central location.

Cloud desktops can help on this front, too, by consolidating applications and data in the cloud, where they can be centrally monitored and managed. Cloud desktops also eliminate the need for employees to download sensitive data or applications to private devices. Instead, data can always reside in a secure location in the cloud, while employees still enjoy the flexibility of accessing it remotely.

Conclusion

The solutions businesses need to enable secure, reliable, compliance-friendly remote work solutions for their employees on a permanent basis are out there. The challenge for many companies will be in upgrading their traditional remote-login technologies to support the needs of employees who work from home on a massive scale. Conventional solutions like VPNs and RDP servers won’t necessarily deliver the functionality businesses need for most employees to work remotely, but newer types of platforms, like cloud desktops, can.