Today’s global commerce landscape requires companies to have essential real-time, critical data about how efficiently their networks are functioning. This is especially true for enterprises engaged in e-commerce where having a clear window into the end user experience enables them to compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace. This holds true for the largest international organizations all the way down to locally based start-ups.
As if the business playing field wasn’t competitive enough, historic disruptions caused by the global pandemic forced companies to re-evaluate how they conduct business operations in order to meet or exceed customer expectations. The impact is profound enough that it caused a significant shift in the direction of global trade — namely in the migration of the workforce to home-based offices.
The move from downtown office suites to cozy living room offices provides the potential for operational security gaps to snowball and contribute to substantial network downtime. Consider the ramifications of lost data, revenue and dissatisfied users to name a few. As long as your workforce remains remotely located, the importance of website monitoring becomes even more essential. Here’s why.
Meeting the demands of the hybrid workspace
The new working-from-home economy has its pros and cons. According to the Pew Research Center, of the 71% of employed adults whose positions allow them to work from home at least part of the week, 87% say they have the technology and equipment to work from home and 80% say they are meeting project deadlines on time.
That’s great news, however, the IT networking challenges of a distributed workforce can be daunting with many potential roadblocks along the way. Employees are scattered across different cities and even different countries making the possibility and consequences of downtime even more plausible and costly. If you consider that the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, it becomes crystal clear why website downtime must be minimized at every opportunity.
Just as important is that IT staff are also remote yet relied upon to overcome unique challenges:
- Increased support requests from employees working in widespread locations.
- They still must handle both routine and non-routine networking maintenance issues.
- IT staff are also contending with their own challenges of working from home.
When employees are working from a central location, IT managers have better control over security. With employees working from home, your website may become more susceptible to cyberattacks, malware and other risks emanating from unsecured home-based networks.
With new risks appearing every day, closing these gaps requires access to a full suite of website monitoring tools you can use to mitigate lost revenue and make it easier for your remote workforce to gain a competitive advantage. Here are a few ideas:
- Set up duty schedules to alert workers only when they are on duty and working.
- Take advantage of integration features that allow for escalation-level alerts within external apps, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and other collaborative platforms.
- Don’t just send an alert. Customize the definition to state how and who should receive the alert.
Use synthetics to knock out blind spots before they become problems
With a remote workforce scattered across different states, regions or countries, greater complexity and larger volumes of data lead to more opportunities for automation blind spots.
Synthetic Monitoring can mitigate downtime and slow load times that can cost large sums of revenue. By having your thumb on every aspect of the end user experience — broadband, cloud, wireless, last mile — you’re better able to detect, identify, escalate and fix performance issues before they result in dissatisfied users.
Let’s not forget the trickle down effect among employees. Website downtime can lead to an average of 23 minutes of lost productivity among staffers. With hundreds of network checkpoints scattered across the globe, you are in a better position to see a clear picture of the end user experience and knock out issues before they affect your bottom line.
The takeaway
Pressure on IT teams to deliver a reliable and consistent experience to employees distributed in home offices, with variable and frequently unstable internet connections, is becoming the new normal for the foreseeable future. It’s not an easy balance to maintain network uptime operating in a post-pandemic ecosystem but with a comprehensive suite of powerful website monitoring tools, including Real User Monitoring, Synthetics and cloud-based network monitoring, you have a much better chance of delivering reliable service to your customers no matter where they are located. Learn more about what Uptrends has to offer to minimize network downtime for remote workforces.
