Is hybrid work a sustainable option for your organization? Personally I believe that if a company implements it correctly it can work very well. In this post I will be going over why I beleive this and my thoughts on how company’s should implement a hybrid working environment
Desclamer: My thoughts and opinions are my own
The Advantages and Disadvantages
The Advantages
One of the main reason I believe that it will work well for companies is it allows employees to have the best of both being in the office with all the advantages that intales as well as the flexibility to work remotely when needed, for example say you need to get work done on your car or you need to travel briefly for personal reasons.
Additionally it forces companies to re-evaluate there storage and networking strategies to allow both a more collaborative and more geodiverse functionality leveraging the cloud often times utilizing tools such as Google Drive and M365. That being said while these cloud platforms can be revolutionary from a collaborative standpoint they do leave a lot to be desired from a security standpoint, a great example of this is in Google Workspace you have very limitted options in how you can limit or allow uses to interact with or share files
Furthermore the same strategies required to allow companies to effective implement hybrid work also allow companies to more easily stand up and secure new lowercost office locations from a IT and infrastructure perspective, where all that is really required is a high speed internet connection, a firewall, and a WiFi solution.
The Disadvantages
While many companies have been embracing the cloud there are some major limitations to the current cloud offerings, some of which are:
- no cloud platform offers the level of integration both user and machine managemeant that an on premises active directory deployment does
- You are adding a huge threat vector storing all your data in the cloud and you must have a rock solid security plan to avoid a breach
- you are trading larger single occurances upfronot costs for ever growing ongoing monthly/yearly license fees
Tips for your technology stack for an effective Hybrid work environment
- Pick either M365 or Google workspace but dont mix both
- The primary reason for this is simpily you will be doubling your cost if you utilze both
- These platforms due to there nature do not play well together
- Utilize either Google Drive or OneDrive/Sharepoint for your day to day file storage
- this will allow you to be able to utilize all the collaborative features that these cloud platforms offer while still allowing you to keep costs down
- Utilize low cost Object based storage for archival storage
- Still allows easy access while being stored on a far more cost affective storage model
- A couple examples of this are Google Cloud Storage (at the Archival tier) or Amazon S3 Glacier
- When choosing a VPN to access any on premises infrastructure you may still have choose something modern
- At the very minimum I would recommend utilizing an SSL based VPN but honestly with the introduction of the wireguard protocol and its vastly improved efficiency across the board I would recommend looking into a service such as Tailscale