The future of work is hybrid: What does this model look like and what are the implications for security?

There’s no doubt that the hybrid work arrangement is here for the long haul. It’s deemed as a more intelligent – and potentially more complex – way to work.

We see big-name companies fully embracing the future of flexible work. Ford has stated that 30,000 of its employees on this continent will be able to work in a “flexible hybrid model”, meaning they stay home for independent work but come to the office for meetings and certain types of projects. (And that’s the catch with many of these work arrangements – companies are making it clear there are expectations to be in the office on certain days.)

Target has gone so far as to end the lease of one of its Minneapolis headquarters buildings as most workers will follow a hybrid work arrangement. Many tech firms have also followed suit: Twitter is one example of a company that has announced it will allow its workers to remain remote on a permanent basis.

Plus there are new ways to refer to the hybrid approach we are starting to hear: Lockheed Martin calls it a “multidimensional” way that its workforce will work going forward (meaning, of course, “hybrid”) and GM simply calls it, “Work Appropriately”.

Important to note is the financial world is not immune to these life-altering work location changes. TIAA has stated that the majority of its workers will work in a hybrid format, with roughly 85 percent of its workforce in the office between two and four days per week. Citigroup has announced much the same.

These officially announced changes to major corporations will trickle down to the mid-market and beyond. And experts are warning that while there are clear advantages to these new work arrangements, there will be a multitude of challenges.

Brian Kropp, VP of research at Gartner, went as far as to state to the Washington Post that, regarding the transition to hybrid, “In a lot of ways it’s going to be more disruptive than when we went all remote.”

Technology will, no surprise, play a key role in the transition and ongoing hybrid arrangement. Videoconferencing technology, which since March of 2020 has become one of the most important tools for many professionals, will continue to be a key to making a hybrid workforce productive and connected to all other stakeholders.

Technology will enable teams to remain:

• Flexible and agile as employees must quickly adapt back and forth between home office and traditional office locations.
• Connected to team members who are working from any number of different geographic locations.
• Productive and able to keep up with needed tasks and work without missing a beat.

Now is the opportunity for companies to learn from the upheaval of the transition to a pandemic work arrangement and fix the oversights and mistakes that were made in 2020.

Now is the opportunity for companies to learn from the upheaval of the transition to a pandemic work arrangement and fix the oversights and mistakes that were made in 2020. We’ve learned that workers will use personal devices to remain productive, even if the security in this situation is completely lacking. We know that the virtual desktop, designed to enable a worker to do their job away from the office via access to the data and tools one can access in the office, provides a less-than-stellar and sub-optimal experience that makes workers cringe.

And note that we have not yet even mentioned the rising data security and compliance risks that now keep business leaders up at night.

The new concerns as we enter our “new normal” are impacting all industries, but are hitting the Registered Investment Advisors and Broker-Dealers firms hard. These companies are looking for a long-term solution to drive their businesses forward and enable (and truly empower) their workers.

There is a solution at hand. At Venn, we have designed, and continue to evolve our product as an essential cloud productivity and security platform.

Designed to protect sensitive applications and data while empowering users to work on personal devices so they can remain flexible and productive, this technology embraces a cloud environment to more efficiently combine a local, personal computer experience with cloud data, all while wrapping data and sensitive information in a secure perimeter. We are all about ensuring both employees and customers are highly protected.

As your team continues to adapt to our changing conditions and plans for the remainder of 2021 and beyond, our team is there to talk to you more about the need for productivity, the need for the highest degree of security, and our solution.