In the best-selling novel ‘The World Is Flat’ by renowned author Thomas Friedman describes his interview with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. He said, ‘Tom, the playing field is leveled’. COVID has brought new meaning to this term. Gone are the days when you were required to sit in an open-space office setting and collaborate with your colleagues in person. The campus of the future is likely to include dynamic workplace settings, with flexible seating and collaboration environments. One of the new and interesting ideas gaining prominence, particularly in the technology space, is the work-from-anywhere movement. An increasing number of companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft now permit many employees to work from home. Millennials have been seen to avail of this flexibility and return back to staying with their parents or even working from exotic locations. Now more than ever, work is wherever you have a secure, high-performance, and reliable network connection.

The hospitality industry has been among the worst impacted by the pandemic. However, some smart hotel chains (Hyatt, Marriott et. al) have taken advantage of this by offering ‘work from hotel’ packages.

Historically working from home in the IT industry meant connectivity with home routers coupled with VPN to get into work.  Unofficially, waiting at your house for a contractor was consider a work-from-home day This used to be good enough for many customers.

For long-term usage, this is an IT nightmare because of the inability to:

1. Manage home network devices
2. Offer high-performance connections during critical calls
3. Secure the environment all the way from the client to headquarters

To overcome these challenges, it is crucial that IT administrators undertake these steps:

1. Cloud Management – Whether customers work from home, branches, hotels, or campus, IT administrators increasingly need to manage an increasingly distributed workforce. A cloud-managed solution with ExtremeCloud IQ helps easily monitor and manage your network lowering the operational burden.
2. Invest in a high Performance Network – Offer high-performance access points such as AP305C/CX or AP30 to your employees. To enable users that work out of a hotel or dorm-room to deploy a Wall-Jack Access Point such as AP150W. Instead of relying on the capabilities (or lack of) home routers, invest in a fully functional solution.
3. Secure the edge – Extend your corporate SSID to homes and hotel rooms with Client Mode or with L2 VPN capability with just a few clicks. With corporate assets and customer data being accessed by employees outside of the physical boundaries of a Campus, having such security will extend your perimeter.