Although the initial anxiety on COVID-19 has dropped by now, lots of Organizations are aware that Remote Work is here to stay. And we see lots of applicable Technologies that can facilitate that. But mostly just up to the point where we come to “Line of Business Applications” (LOBs).
Most of my Customers have a pretty traditional setup of their IT Infrastructure in a on premises data center. Active Directory, member Servers running (legacy) client/server applications in sometimes a 2-tier infrastructure. The Local Area Network (LAN) sits in the Corporate Building and all Desktops have connectivity to the local data center. Some of these Customers started with moving some workloads to the Cloud, mainly email that goes to Office 365. Adoption and moving more workloads or starting to use new things in the Office 365 platform is going very slow.
And now we need to work remote. Outside of the Corporate LAN. That poses several challenges. For the sake of the topic I refrain from looking at processes relying on physical paper although a lot of my Customers still do so. Of course, that makes the challenge of working remotely even more complex.
The Devices
In most Office buildings people have a Desktop, I think in most cases, even in this COVID-19 situation, people are not allowed to take that one home. And even if they are allowed, it will not be connected to the Corporate LAN, so work as usual is not an option. Also, things like Group Policies (including Security settings) will not be applied to those Desktops. Corporate laptops suffer the same unless they are decently prepared for remote work. Lots of people will work on their personal device from home, or even their family device, Organizations have to realize that those devices are totally out of control. Then, users will use anything trying to accomplish their tasks using any application they can find. That list is endless by now and 99% of it fits in the category of “Shadow IT”, corporate data can and will flow anywhere.
Business Applications
Organizations can use a lot of different applications throughout their companies, per department or division. Some of them will just be a standalone application, a lot of them will tie back into a backend in the datacenter. Are these Line of Business Applications accessible for Remote Workers? Can they be made accessible, in a secure and user-friendly way? Some protocols to connect to these backends are not that suitable to traverse Wide Area Network (WAN) connections, resulting in a bad user experience or very limited functionality. Some Organizations already have some of their Applications accessible from outside the Corporate LAN
In general, a Client device must be fully managed and sit as close to the Data Centre as possible, preferably over Corporate LAN Connections. Add to that, a decent Data Protection configuration. That is the ideal situation. Or is it?
There are numerous options to make LOB Applications accessible for use outside of the Corporate LAN, and they all have their pros and cons.
What we can see happening right now is a myriad of all these options, which is fine as long as there is a Strategy or Vision stating where it leads to. If a Strategy is lacking all we are left with is a pile of unmanageable “spaghetti”. In the meantime, all scenarios could be valid under some specific circumstances. There is not one right way of doing it.
My “prefect picture” would look like “All Applications deployed in the Cloud, preferably as SaaS or PaaS Solution. All Devices managed through M365”.