COVID-19 put a lot of pressure on the network infrastructure. With millions of people working remotely for the foreseeable future, global internet usage will remain at record levels. Every remote worker now needs bandwidth for video conferencing, voice calls over Wi-Fi, instant messaging, and various cloud-based work apps, before additional infrastructure pressures are factored in. home", such as streaming for educational and entertainment purposes. The pressure is strong enough that European nations are asking Netflix and YouTube to slow down their streaming.
About the Author Curtis Peterson, Executive Vice President of Operations, RingCentral. With 7 in 10 knowledge workers working from home, what are the considerations for businesses and CIOs given the increased use of data? Can steps be taken to alleviate the increased need for bandwidth? These three key areas are what businesses and employees need to consider when it comes to increased network usage:
1. Protection measures for data centers and cloud configurations.
There was a brief moment where we thought the situation might be short term, but we generally accept that we will not go back to normal, we will create a new standard that will include more people working from home than ever before. Evaluate existing cloud services to ensure that your applications can fully support a full work from home environment. During these periods, the network traffic changes considerably. Instead of using the corporate network, each employee accesses cloud resources from home by connecting through their home carriers and home broadband providers. Therefore, cloud providers must have set the peer level to support this type of connectivity. If you haven't recently discussed this with your cloud provider, now is the time.
2. The implications of the last mile for homeworkers
A common question is asked in business continuity planning: "What percentage of your employees can work remotely right now?" For each cloud service provider, the only acceptable answer is 100%. No adjustments should be necessary to manage remote work capabilities. However, in terms of resilience risk, the standard “last mile capacity” problem is a bit different since it is residential. Companies often buy fiber or other technologies for broadband services. And what I mean by that is that the IT infrastructure in place is designed to prevent disruption. Unfortunately for the home or distributed user, they usually only have one option, and certainly from a cost perspective, that option is usually oversubscribed. In a business situation, if you sell 500 megabits per second, you expect to see 500 megabits per second at some point. In a residential service, you could be sold 300 megabits per second or even gigabit per second service, but you are oversubscribed most of the time. The risk here is that when all home users pile up at the same time, they overwhelm these "last mile services" and, in turn, their neighborhoods. In general, increased usage places significant loads on existing backbone networks and basic telephone services around the world. We've seen some lockdowns, but overall, the networks have been very successful during this crisis. For the most part, a home user sometimes needs to stop showing some movies in order for everyone to go to virtual classrooms and their parents to work from home.
3. Experience in lightening the load on the infrastructure.
I think one of the main lessons from this task "experience" is that CIOs need to be flexible. There are quick fixes to overcome overuse. For example, avoid starting a meeting at the top of the hour. Peak meetings were already full on a typical work day and now our current homework situation certainly looks completely outdated. Simply moving your meeting 30 minutes to the end of the hour will likely result in much more successful connectivity. If you want to go further, you can even suggest that people start their quarterly meetings. Also, employees should try to make calls over Wi-Fi whenever possible. There are only a few phone lines in any given country, and adding phone lines is a very slow process, even under the best of circumstances. Using applications that support voice connectivity is one way to bypass the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), using available broadband instead. Workers could also change schedules, and certainly stamp schedules between different departments in different groups, so they don't overwrite the same systems. Of course, this only works when employees access the same services.
A major but manageable problem.
While CIOs and businesses will try to put processes in place to support remote work, the bottom line is that all the challenges and frustrations of using the network lie in the "last mile." We have not only sent workers home, we have sent home children and those who need extra care. These people use broadband applications such as telemedicine and distance education; along with thousands of new home workers, this adds a lot of pressure to the network. CIOs should look to heavy use of the home network, and companies should advise employees to keep working conditions as sterile as possible. Simple things like turning off streaming, turning off automatic updates on personal devices, and paying attention to other people's schedules in the same house can help. Finally, we just need to keep practicing. If you don't need to download something right now, wait. A few small actions like this will go a long way in stopping network overload, helping to keep everyone productive and entertained as we train to stay at home.