Before COVID-19, the U.S. government estimated that 7% of civilian workers – about 9.8 million people – were working from home.
No one predicted just how abruptly this would change as the number of employees working from home skyrocketed in the first quarter of 2020. According to Forbes, “an early-April 2020 MIT survey of 25,000 American workers found that 34% of those who’d been employed four weeks earlier said they’re currently working from home. Combined with the roughly 15% who said they’d been working from home pre-COVID-19, that means nearly half the U.S. workforce might now be remote workers.”
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This is not a short-term change. Science, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, published a study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health which found that “…prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022.”
Working from home is here to stay for the foreseeable future. And corporate IT, which scrambled heroically to equip and transition large portions of their workforces to secure remote work, must embrace the new workstyles as essentially permanent.
What does this mean for IT and the workforces they serve?
“The new focus for IT is on ensuring long-term flexibility for their workers,” said Jonathan Lieberman, CEO at itopia. “No one can be sure how long work from home will remain the new standard. But there is a great opportunity for IT to equip their workforces now with technologies that will give their enterprises the flexibility to keep pace with changing workstyles, no matter how quickly changes happen in the future.”
As a software company dedicated to modernizing IT management, itopia’s cloud-native software automates and orchestrates infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform, enabling enterprises to securely deliver Desktop as a Service to their global workforce. For workers, this means transitioning from unprotected personal devices to cloud-based virtual sessions that permit them to work remotely from any device, with secure access to their business apps and sensitive corporate data. For enterprise IT, this means ensuring the protection of their organization’s data, maintaining regulatory compliance, and reducing the cost and complexity of managing a distributed workforce.
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And the best news of all: itopia’s software can deploy remote desktops for a large-scale workforce on Google Cloud in as quickly as one day.
“itopia has dedicated itself to providing long term, incredibly flexible work from home technology for the global enterprise,” said James Riley, VP of Strategic Alliances. “And now we’re not only continuing our standing offer of prioritized 24-hour implementations for new remote desktop deployments, but we’re raising the game with up to 150 free itopia licenses for qualifying use cases.”
Long term workforce flexibility is achievable in a single day.