The recently unveiled Hybrid Work Index by Cisco, collected from millions of aggregated and anonymous customer data points, shows that hybrid workers expect greater flexibility, accessibility and security from their businesses that grapple to meet these technology demands.The report shows that 64% of the workers agree that hybrid workplaces directly affect whether they want to leave or stay at a job. On the other hand, it is still uncertain that employers will realize the potential of hybrid work, with 47% of employers thinking that their company will allow working from anywhere vs. in-office over the next 6-12 months.
Personal health and wellness, along with flexible work arrangements, are non-negotiable for a vast majority of workers in a hybrid workplace.
Along with workspaces, on-the-go meetings have skyrocketed during the pandemic. “Pre-pandemic, people used mobile devices 9% of the time to connect to their meetings. In a hybrid work world, this number tripled and is now at 27%,” reports the HWI.
With over 61 million meetings taking place every month, according to the Cisco report, only 48% of participants are likely to speak in any one of the meetings and 98% of these meetings have at least 1 person joining remotely, which shines a light on the need for inclusion of the remote participants.
This wave of remote meetings has paved the way for AI capabilities to enhance the remote working experience with over 200% growth in usage of AI capabilities from July through September 2021. “This includes meeting features like noise reduction, automatic translation and transcriptions, polling, and gesture recognition – making it easier for people to engage in conversation, whether they’re virtual or in-room,” states the HWI.
The Index also bring key findings for the technology leaders as it reveals that home networks have become one of the most critical parts of the enterprise network with 2x faster growth in teleworker devices compared to small and medium business routers since the pandemic started
In terms of user-centric security, the number of malicious remote access attempts grew 2.4x In September 2021, the hybrid workforce was targeted with more than 100 million email threats daily, which underscores the importance of security infrastructures that keep work accessible to the right users and out of reach of fraudulent actors.
HWI states that collaboration applications are now the 1 most monitored application type globally, and have surpassed secure access and productivity application monitoring, which were more heavily monitored at the onset of the pandemic and move to work-from-home.
The report shows that the cloud provider networks showcase more stability than ISPs, with the cloud provider networks accounting for just 5% of the outage incident volume, while the other 95% accounted for by ISPs from January to August 2021. From January 2020 to August 2021, cloud provider networks accounted for just 5% of outage incident volume. ISP networks accounted for the remaining 95% of outage incidents. This growth is led by the higher education, professional services, and hospitality industries.
