NetMotion: Persistent connectivity – the holy grail for agile fee earners
It’s not that long ago that Linklaters, one of the world’s elite law firms, announced that their employees would be free to work from home for up to half of the week. The firm believed that the Covid-19 pandemic (and the associated enforced remote working experiment) had given them an opportunity to explore in more depth their approach to agile and remote working. Linklaters are not alone in their approach. Other major law practices around the world are now allowing staff to work from home part of the time – the question is whether or not this will become the de facto working practice for the legal sector. Is this just a temporary way of working or will this agile approach remain once we return to ‘normal’?
As firms evolve and adapt to meet the demands of a different way of working, ensuring that their workforce can seamlessly interact with each other and their clients is critical to delivering the service clients expect. The legal sector is well known for leading from the front and law firms everywhere are adopting innovative new technologies to better reflect the ‘work from anywhere environment’ – ensuring secure access to resources and enhancing the end user experience will be key factors at play. Essentially, mirroring the experience of working from an office is what’s required.
And with so many legal firms proving that they have the ability for their staff to work successfully from home, how do they ensure that their people are just as productive as they were before? IT and security teams will certainly have to grapple with security and compliance issues that arise from agile and remote working, and they need to ensure that their people can connect securely, without sacrificing user experience. And, critically, all of this needs to be done without compromising the service level provided to clients. It all needs to be completely seamless.
Persistent Connectivity Matters
Persistent connectivity matters. Persistent connectivity effectively allows you to do more. How frustrating for the user when connectivity drops, or when the device that they are working on can’t find a network to connect to (or if the device switches between different networks). When connectivity drops, and re-connection is required then there is that small period where the user is not connected at all. And the user might have to re-authenticate or log into their VPN again (most VPNs don’t play very nicely when they lose connectivity). All of these different scenarios ultimately disrupt the user experience – persistent connectivity provides the flexibility to overcome these challenges. When you enjoy consistent connectivity you are making sure that the technology works as it was designed to work, allowing staff to rely on optimum user experience, anytime, anywhere – in effect, supplying them with that office-like experience, wherever they are. Just think about how many hours might be spent on a train, in a hotel or even on a client site. Consistent connectivity is key here – consistent in any of these locations.
Connectivity will be a fundamental component for successful remote working as firms try to meet the demands of an increasingly mobile workforce. Ultimately, they need encrypted and reliable connections that enable them to quickly and easily reach business applications and services. Working in a disconnected environment can lead to frustrated workforce, less than ideal with new remote working policies in place.
Optimising Traffic = Improved User Experience
Traffic optimisation fine-tunes connection performance so that essential business applications run reliably across networks. Mobile traffic optimisation ensures that applications, resources and connections are tuned for weak and intermittent network coverage and can roam between wireless networks as conditions and availability change. When connections aren’t performing well, applications that are crucial for job performance can experience packet loss, jitter or latency that can make working on the hoof extremely tricky. Compared to wired networks, wireless networks operate under highly variable conditions, including such factors as terrain or congested mobile towers.
Optimising the flow of traffic helps to manage packet loss. Such packet losses are effectively data loss, which happens very regularly when you’re on the move or transitioning between different networks. Applications that require a lot of data tend to become fairly unusable when you hit about 10% packet loss, which can be a common occurrence if you regularly commute by train, for example. Our offering, for example, enables critical applications to work and prevents disruptions at over 50% packet loss – in this way, employees can rely on technology performing well in situations and locations where it simply could not before. That is incredibly powerful for firms.
As law firms everywhere adopt innovative new technologies to better reflect the ‘work from anywhere environment’, they need to consider more sophisticated ways to ensure secure access to resources and to enhance the end user experience, especially for key team members.
