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Chapter 1

The new realities of hybrid workplace

Chapter 2

Accelerating workplace transformation

Chapter 3

Workplace transformation in action and success stories

ACCELERATE
YOUR WORKPLACE
EVOLUTION

How enterprises can build and adapt for an ever-changing world by building a Secure Connected and Digital Workplace

2021 | Secure Connected Digital Workplace

Chapter 1

The new realities of
hybrid workplace

Chapter 2

Accelerating workplace
transformation

Chapter 3

Workplace transformation
in action and
success stories -
The Secure Connected Digital Workspace Solution Suite

O
OUR WORLD HAS CHANGED

We all know the world today is a vastly different place from the one we knew at the beginning of 2020. New realities call for flexibility, an ability to rethink, reimagine, and adapt to changes in the business landscape in real-time. Organisations that lead with a digital-first mindset will be the successful businesses of tomorrow.
The work norms have changed—and so have workplace setups. The cloud-first era has diversified work models into the following:

Traditional

Work From Home

Hybrid

Buildings and physical workplaces may not be the sole containers of productivity and engagement for many businesses. Hybrid workplaces are compelling organisations to reimagine workspaces of the future – agile, connected, seamless, secure, and productive. Modern workforces need to be able to work on the go with the same efficiency as on-premises.

The future of work and workplaces is undergoing an evolution right here before us - and if managed correctly, it can lead to enterprise and employee growth.

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THE WORKPLACE TRANSFORMATION

Organisations need to keep pace with hybrid workplaces and adjust to new realities:

1.  The Digital First Workplace

Hybrid Workplace models will require organisations to adopt a digital-first approach. It will need them to rethink aspects of connectivity, collaboration, and security.

For most businesses, transforming into a digital-first enterprise while continuing to create value for customers and driving growth for the enterprise will require focus around:

Empowering: employees, partners, and customers to ‘work from anywhere’.
 

Enablement: stakeholders through agile, secure, and scalable networks that drive growth and create trust.

Experiences: user experience through a seamless and secure digital-first business landscape.

2. Will we ever return to 'traditional offices?'

Will a significant, statistically reassuring number of vaccinated coworkers encourage us to return to traditional routines and workplaces?

We have, over the past year, witnessed a significant and radical shift in corporate behaviour. Roles that could never be fulfilled remotely – for compliance requirements, perceived vulnerabilities of enterprise data, or the sheer nature of the job – are being performed remotely. Organisations have had to re-think compliance, policy, productivity norms for such roles.

Regardless of the percentage of people returning to the office, this is the start of an evolution. A new and more efficient model for the future is emerging.

3. Cost-benefit analysis for enterprises

With newer, more efficient ways of working becoming real, the future presents significant and unique opportunities for potential financial savings.

There is a growing realisation that reduced energy consumption (in maintaining physical workspaces) means a proportionate reduction in carbon footprints. Good not just for profits, but also for the planet.

The shift to remote work has also presented the opportunity for businesses to re-evaluate overhead costs for property, service charges, upkeep, and maintenance, leading to significant OPEX benefits.

There are also significant personal advantages for individual employees. Reduced costs of accommodation and rent, skipping rush hour traffic, moving to smaller cities, a feeling of being in control, being able to decide your own work-life balance are some of the direct outcomes of this new reality.

4. Business continuity and enterprise readiness in the wake of a similar crisis

Recent global events have accelerated the need to be future-ready. Enterprises need to be prepared for future business disruptions.

But how do enterprises future-proof their infrastructure and ensure business readiness? The four phases of planning—prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery—can help. However, true enterprise readiness also comes from the multiple aspects of connectivity, collaboration, sustainability, and security. Any business continuity plan rests on the back of a digital infrastructure that is flexible, adaptable, and scalable.

“A leading retailer used the drop in activity triggered by the crisis, to conduct a systematic, cross-functional review of its network, logistics operations, and procurement model. Applying advanced analytics, the business slimmed-down product assortment, trimmed warehouse and logistics requirements, and significantly reduced procurement costs. Ramping up their new operating model, they expect to cut overall operating costs by ~30%.”

5. Boosting employee productivity while working from anywhere

A recent HBR study* illustrates that without a daily commute during the pandemic, U.S. workers saved ~ 89 million hours each week, equivalent to nearly 45 million full workdays.

Reduced commute times have helped employees focus on personal and professional development, leading to increased productivity in the workplace.

Primary reasons for this increased productivity included fewer distractions, reduced commute times, and flexible working hours. It most certainly also adds to increased feelings of well-being.

Remote working jobs are no longer customer service jobs. They are in sectors such as Computer and IT, Medical and Health, Sales, and Education.

Challenges to overcome

The future of work may be hybrid, but there are several challenges to making it a reality.

It presupposes a connected ecosystem beyond just the perimeter of the enterprise, enabling seamless interactivity of devices and engagement among people. As employees access enterprise apps remotely via the cloud or untrusted networks, the next big threat is likely to remain imperceptible. Businesses will have to consider security issues concerning individual identity, corporate devices, and enterprise applications; and fostering digital trust that secures engagements, connections, and integrity of digital assets and data will increasingly be a key consideration.

Organisations will be required to drive growth, manage complexity, enable flexibility, and accelerate this new reality.

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HOW TATA COMMUNICATIONS CAN HELP YOU ACCELERATE WORKPLACE EVOLUTION

Transforming your workplace and thriving in this new landscape requires a comprehensive approach to adopting and adapting to a digital-first business. A key element, besides culture and processes, is the technology ecosystem of the enterprise.

With our Secure Connected Digital Workplace suite of solutions, we help you evolve into a future-ready, digital-first enterprise. Using our offerings, you can build an agile, adaptable, scalable digital ecosystem that drives growth, and addresses critical business imperatives:

Empower employees to thrive, from anywhere with secure remote access to enterprise data and applications; through data centres or over the cloud, including open, untrusted networks and endpoint devices.

Fuel productivity through seamless collaboration, unified platforms for digital-first teams allow them to collaborate and engage within and beyond the organisation’s digital perimeter.

Drive digital first experiences for employees and customers next-gen contact centres that seamlessly extend operations, allowing agents to call, chat, respond to customer queries - from the office and beyond.

Ensure employee health and safety especially for businesses that require their workforce to be present in physical workplaces.

Empowering seamless & secure work from anywhere

By enabling Zero Trust Access to Cloud and Data Centre applications

A secure, seamless work-from-anywhere experience is a cornerstone to driving productivity. Businesses must deliver secure access to critical enterprise applications, especially as employees and partners tap into these resources using home internet or untrusted networks from hybrid workplaces.

The Secure Connected Digital Workplace uses Zero-Trust Network Access to ensure employees can access applications in the cloud, in the data center, or SaaS applications over multiple devices. The solution acts as a single point of access to multiple cloud environments and data centers, enabling seamless access for enhanced productivity.

The Secure Connected Digital Workplace compliance and validation capability ensures robust posture checks of endpoint devices accessing corporate networks, enabling real-time identification and removal of endpoint threats and governance of device access to applications.

IT teams can enforce multi-factor authentication and Single Sign-On for multiple application capabilities for end-users, as well as scan intrusions and malware from internet-based content, sandboxing for advanced detections of suspicious activity.

Success story: Building a Hybrid Workplace for a Power Generation Company
  • Challenge: Business continuity was being impacted as teams could not access critical business applications while operating remotely.
  • Solution: Netfoundry, Tata Communications’ military-grade zero trust dark network enabling secure and seamless access to critical apps from anywhere, over any device and network.
  • Impact: 200 employees working from home are now connected over a highly secure and encrypted NaaS. App performance over shared broadband has also improved three-fold without affecting the quality of access.

Securing the Untrusted

By enabling Zero Trust Access to Cloud and Data Centre applications

As working from anywhere becomes mainstream, employees will invariably browse third party sites and apps over corporate devices. Protection of data, company applications, and endpoint devices will be a key consideration.The Secure Connected Digital Workplace provides seamless yet secure access to applications.

Enabled by our remote VPN services - a mix of symmetric and public-key encryption to secure network communications, enables access to applications. Cyber-threat protection scans intrusions and malware from internet-based content, handles DDOS attacks, identifies and manages known bad behavior such as malicious actors attempting network/app access, correlated with failed logins.

It also provides data protection capability via our end-to-end encrypted Zero Trust Network Access, Global Secure Internet Gateway Service (GSIGS) CASB and managed authentication (mAuth) offering. Enterprises receive complete context and content inspection for all data address cloud service risks, enforcing security policies and complying with regulations.

Success story: Transforming employee experience for a Global IT consulting firm
  • Challenge: Operating remotely, employees were struggling to access data and apps at multi-location customer sites, while maintaining necessary regulatory and security compliances.
  • Solution: Tata Communications’ Global Secure Internet Gateway Service (GSIGS), Virtual unified threat management (vUTM) and managed authentication (mAuth) 2FA ensured seamless access and extra layers of security.
  • Impact: 18,000 employees around the world are now able to securely access apps remotely and continue working seamlessly—while driving the highest level of customer satisfaction due to unhindered access.

Digital-First Customer Experiences

With our cloud-based Contact Centre as a Service

As part of the Secure Connected Digital Workplace, our InstaCC Global Contact Centre as a Service is a pioneering solution that enables contact center teams to operate remotely in a seamless and secure environment, while ensuring the highest levels of customer experience.

This cloud-based offering provides agents with full functionality including the ability to receive and make calls, and perform activities like hold/resume, conference, and transfer through their mobile or laptop.

Also, part of this is the ability to secure leverage VPN and vUTM, which ensures organisations can drive secured engagement across customers, partners, and employees, and at the same time offer a consistent and omnichannel experience.

Success story: Enabling superlative customer experience for an Australian Service Provider
  • Challenge: Enabling a contact centre environment that provided the flexibility and scalability of operations as per changes in business requirements and the need to enable remote working.
  • Solution: Tata Communications’ Cloud Based InstaCC Global Contact centre.
  • Impact: A robust helpdesk that provided more responsive support, seamless transition from the legacy architecture, business continuity from anywhere and reduced CapEx investments.

Boosting Productive Team Collaboration

Helping teams collaborate securely from anywhere with our cloud-based UCaaS solutions

Seamless use of instant messaging, screen sharing, and collaboration tools are key to the success of workplaces of the future. Our cloud-based collaboration solution enables digital-first teams to work – and succeed – together and seamlessly from anywhere in the world.

This is about fueling location-independent productivity through effective collaboration. Having the right tools is not enough, it is also about the underlying infrastructure.

Which is why the Secure Connected Digital Workplace provides video, voice, messaging, and file-sharing capabilities from a single platform. Cloud-based and secure, this delivers productive collaboration, so organisations scale easily, receiving the highest quality of service and proactive fraud prevention capabilities.

Success story: Enhancing the productivity of distributed remote teams for a Global Consulting Firm
  • Challenge: Mixed legacy collaboration tools made it difficult to keep operations in step, especially as teams went remote and in countries where internet performance was a concern.
  • Solution: Tata Communications’ Global VPN platform and a Cisco-powered Hosted Calling solution for unified, company-wide collaboration.
  • Impact: Significant rise in employee productivity, especially in Asia Pacific. The ability to launch ad-hoc conferences, complemented by an invaluable business continuity enhanced customer experience.

Safe and secure workforce

Powered by our proprietary IoT and LORA WAN solutions

Workforce safety is more important for business continuity than ever before. With the Secure Connected Digital Workplace’s IoT-based technology, we help enterprises implement safety protocols, such as contactless entry-exit and social distancing measures.

Our patented Employee Health & Safety Wearable device helps monitor heart rate and skin temperature, detect falls and immobility, predict employee proximity to a hazardous area or to co-workers to help them maintain social distancing. Employee SafePass, like a regular ID card, with an IoT chip and Bluetooth enables location tracking, proximity geofencing based audio alarm for hazardous areas, and an SOS Button with 2-way alerts for quick responses, provides comprehensive safety.

Success story: Creating a safe physical work environment for a large steel manufacturer
  • Challenge: The organisation needed a zero-incident safety policy to improve productivity- track worker location, monitor safety incidents and employee wellbeing in midst of COVID outbreak.
  • Solution: Tata Communications’ Employee Health and Safety solution offered a systemised approach to incident management, addressing health and safety proactively.
  • Impact: Significant improved employee safety and productivity and timely actions to any health or accidental incidents.

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DISCOVER MORE

A part of the wider digital experience delivered by Tata Communications, the Secure Connected Digital Workplace empowers enterprises with an omnipresent network along with access to hybrid cloud and the internet. This agile, scalable network, developed for seamless collaboration ensures workforce safety for both remote and office workers. It's an all-in-one solution for an ever-changing digital world.

To find out more about the Secure Connected Digital Workplace, please contact business@tatacommunications.com

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SYNOPSIS

The recent disruptions in business and the emerging digital trends have forced enterprises to re-think their business models, reimagining them with a more agile, performant network, digital business processes, and an always-on, always-connected, digital workplace. This eBook summarizes the different aspects of building a Secure Connected and Digital Workplace to ensure business continuity and unlock new benefits.

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