For many businesses, implementing remote work policies was a nice to offer benefit, but now with COVID-19 pandemic, remote work from home technology capabilities are being tested.

Nearly half (46%) of American organizations are implementing remote work policies because of the pandemic, according to a recent survey by Willis Towers Watson. While recent reports have acknowledged that the U.S. internet is well-equipped to handle the work-from-home surge, are enterprises ready to support this type of remote connectivity?

Most organizations design their remote access unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) network requirements around normal operations to support occasional work-from-home scenarios and remote workers, which is normally about 29% of the workforce according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

However, in an emergency situation, like COVID-19, new healthcare precautions and policies are being formulated and enforced throughout the enterprise that create a very high percentage of remote workers. 

Early complaints from newly forced remote users are experiencing busy conference lines, dropped calls, delayed video and overall jittery connectivity. 

It is easy to say it is an internet and software issue, but is it?

Without proper analysis, these are just assumptions making it difficult for IT professionals to support remote workers.

How does this impact IT Teams?

For the IT team, this is a very different and more complex networking scenario, and they must ensure they have the capacity and tools in place to effectively monitor and manage operations. 

It is crucial that collaboration systems and communication services are seamless, secure and support employee efficiency now more than ever. If the communication network fails now, it not only negatively impacts productivity, but the consequences will reach as far as the customer experience and the business’ bottom line. 

For example,

“Charles Schwab Corp. said it’s rushing to get more employees working from home, conceding its systems weren’t built to withstand the stresses on the business that the coronavirus outbreak has caused.” -Bloomberg 

This is just one example of the problems businesses face today. It’s more important than ever for IT teams to quickly identify failure points and address them. 

Where does Nectar fit in this equation?

Nectar helps enterprises ensure they have the right bandwidth, throughput and configuration needed to support a high percentage of “work-from-home” sessions. 

Nectar Perspective is a network assessment and monitoring tool designed specifically for voice and video—the most sensitive and critical traffic on the network. It enables the IT team to test capabilities before there is a strain on the network. 

Every Nectar Perspective agent deployed can support up to 50 simultaneous synthetic voice sessions to both test and also monitor the health of remote connections for key voice quality telemetry such as jitter, packet loss and latency. 

Perspective can be deployed on stand-alone lightweight, plug-and-play hardware devices or installed on standard PCs.