Security teams need visibility into the threats targeting remote workers

Although only 33% of organizations are currently using a dedicated digital experience monitoring solution today, nearly half of IT leaders are now likely to invest in these solutions as a result of the events of 2020, a NetMotion survey reveals.

Digital experience monitoring

In addition, the research revealed that tech leaders tend to overestimate the positive experience of remote workers – with IT estimating the quality of the remote working experience to be 21% higher than actual remote workers rated it.

“The past eight months have revealed fundamental blind spots in the way many IT teams have traditionally monitored the digital experiences of remote workers,” said Christopher Kenessey, CEO of NetMotion.

“Digital experience monitoring is emerging as the next crucial addition to IT’s toolbox in today’s remote working world, where IT no longer owns the networks that employees are using. Simply put, our research confirms that IT teams can’t fix what they can’t see.”

Remote work causing more technology issues, IT is hard-pressed to solve them

Since the beginning of COVID-19, nearly 75% of organizations have seen an increase in support tickets from remote workers, with 46% reporting a moderate increase and 29% reporting a large increase in workload, according to the survey. This extra burden is straining already stretched IT teams.

Further, from an IT, tools and technology perspective, 48% of workers prefer the experience of working in the office. That may be because IT has a harder time diagnosing employee tools and technology challenges outside of controlled office settings.

According to the survey, over 25% of IT teams admit struggling to diagnose the root cause of remote worker issues; and ensuring reliable network performance was cited as the top challenge for IT leaders surveyed, with 46% reporting the problem.

Joining these issues, IT leaders listed the following challenges encountered this year:

• Software and application issues (43%)
• Remote worker cybersecurity (43%)
• Hardware performance and configuration (38%)

Strained IT-employee relationship

The survey also revealed that the new remote work dynamic may be straining the IT-employee relationship, with remote workers not fully trusting IT to provide the help they need.

While 45% of remote workers say their IT department values employee feedback, 26% of employees said they didn’t feel that their feedback would change anything, and 29% were undecided.

Furthermore, while 66% of remote workers reported encountering an IT issue while working remotely, many are not sharing their issues with IT. In fact, 58% of remote workers said that they had encountered IT issues while working remotely but did not share them with their IT team, and of the issues they reported to IT, only 46% were actually resolved.

“As everyone has gravitated towards a ‘work from anywhere’ status, IT teams have struggled to support employees. Workers are accessing a wider variety of resources from countless unknown networks, reducing visibility and making it exponentially more difficult for IT to diagnose the root cause of technology failures,” Kenessey said.

“Sadly, our research showed that nearly a quarter of remote workers would rather suffer in silence than engage tech teams. Without dedicated tools to monitor the experience of remote and mobile workers, IT teams are at a disadvantage when diagnosing and resolving technology challenges, and that’s putting greater strain on the IT-business relationship.”