eweekchat

A3: Definitely. Keep in mind that when you WFH, you're generally doing it full time as your main income...

Get a fast Internet and a "zoom room" (lol another variation of "zoom" :))

A3: … it used to be that the company invested in the infrastructure to buy your cube or office gear. But when you work from home, it's a factory, warehouse, lab, studio, and office.

A3: Bandwidth is key. When I bought this house, as part of the diligence process, I put in broadband and tested it. If it had failed, I would not have moved forward with this property.

A3 -- and talk to your boss to make sure he/she is comfortable managing a remote employee. And talk to HR to understand if the org can help you with special expenses. And talk to IT to make sure that tools will support you at home. And talk to security ...

A3: But there's also the need to identify spaces in your home (or potential home) that work with your work needs. Do you need a desk? Or do you need a full testing lab and a studio, as I do? That impacts your purchase or rental decision, too.

A3b - /and talk to security to make sure that you understand the parameters that you need to abide by. Do you need to access work resources from a sanctioned device, can you use your own personal iPhone, or not, etc.

A3: What about internal bandwidth? Do you run cables through the wall for Ethernet or just Wi-Fi? Or a mesh? All of that has to be considered. What about the condition of the power lines? Are they reliable, solid, or ancient?

A3: The biggest challenges I hear are enough separate space for all the people. Two parents and 2 kids all working and learning from home. An apartment in SF with 5 renters all on zoom meetings. Not an easy problem to solve, and it is driving some movement to lower cost geos.

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A3: We bought our house pre-pandemic so explaining our working from home needs baffled the real estate agents. Today, that would be easier.

At @Exabeam we did a survey last year where it came out that 49% of all respondents said "most challenging psychological shift when working from home for security teams working remotely" was "distractions in the home making individuals more prone to mistakes"

A3. Every company should allow as many meetings without camera turned on and also have at least one day of no meetings IMO

A3: Because I do so many online videos and webcasts, we actually cobbled together a light system that indicates whether or not quiet in the house is required. It works, but it's weird. Fortunately, my family understands my odd life.

A3: Well, except for the puppy. He doesn't care about work.

A3. Since I live in the Bay Area (temperate weather), sitting in the backyard as much as possible leaves me with more energy at the end of the day, as compared to being inside a room,

@DavidGewirtz We were contemplated something similar, like the red light 'recording' by the door in music studios :)

A3: One thing that's been harder was that a key component of my WFH strategy was writing in coffee shops. It was good when I just needed a change of scenery. Then...2020.

@DavidGewirtz I think a lot of people need to work in multiple spaces to stay sane and be productive. So a mix of home, coffee shops, parks, sitting in your car, on a walk etc. are required.

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A3 -- re: scenery, sometimes changing settings helps with "thinking outside the box", other times it can be a distraction. Depends on the task at hand...

A3: which means it's not just about enabling WFH, it's about enabling WFA with productivity, privacy and security.

A2: Sigh. That depends. Power users will always create the environment they need. And some folks will always have a hard time "getting it" and need some form of semi-divine (or at least IT) intervention.

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A2: Zoom also offered a generous free version, so folks can adopt it and get up and running with it fast and without making a big buy decision.

I think that's why the man at Cisco Systems left to start up Zoom--had to do a lot of with UX!

A2 -- user expectation will never be the same after the iPhone and Android apps. Users are less and less willing to have big learning curves, convenience is more key... problem is, security has not always been following...

A2: Chris, also keep in mind that the cloud (in the form of SaaS apps) has made WFH far more doable. That's kind of UX, because many people just continued to do at home what they did at work. Gmail is Gmail.

A2: Modern intuitive consumer experiences set the bar, fairly or not. People acting as employees or customers or partners for any business want the same level of ease of use they experience when ordering an Uber, Venmoing money to a friend, or checking an insurance claim status.

A2 -- what is kinda new though, is how permeable the frontier is. Meaning, while before it was tolerated that "corporate" tools were a pain to use compared to personal tools, that is not the case anymore

A2: And why do enterprises care? Because superior digital experiences that are easy to use translate directly to customer acquisition and customer retention.

A2: I'll give you a historical perspective. Back in the dark ages before the cloud, i had a top-performing sales person. She got married and moved across the country.…

A2: ...Today, that wouldn't change anything, but then we lost her as a salesperson because our CRM was LAN based and locked on-premise.

A2 -- this expectation is creating lots of pressure on security. "Security" was not used to having to be user friendly, but now has to get on with the program :)

@DavidGewirtz That sounds so ancient :)

@CloudNotEnough It was. I have gray hair. :)

A2: "user friendly enough" is a rising tide, and successful companies will invest in UX heavily, always raising the bar and using it as a competitive differentiator.

My reference is to data across multiple apps, multiple ckouds

A1 - That's a great question. I think the current WFH situation is really a forcing point for everyone to understand 1) how to measure work productivity, and 2) how to secure people as an attack channel.

A1. Remote work is driving more data sprawl than ever before – we heard from our customers - 67% of IT executives are concerned about unstructured data sprawl, and more than half say remote work is the main culprit.

(moving this into the thread) A1: You know, I'd actually say it's something else: acceptance of working from home. WFH has always been a bit of a fringe activity, but now with COVID, acceptance has gone through the roof.

A1: I think the most progress has come from a new workplace philosophy. WFH used to be for a subset of work - some workers, some projects, some tasks. Now, companies need to enable all employees, partners, and customers to do everything online.

But Gorka is right, the security issue is also a big concern.

A1 - There has always been -some- WFH, bu the sheer scale of that today, and how organizations have to embrace it is really the difference. Along with the Cloud, it is really the final nail in the coffin of the "security perimeter" as an architectural approach to security.

A1. To have more control, data goverance policies getting enforced without getting "in the way" is key. Further, getting the content management architecture right is key. examples files sitting on unsecured devices, data loss, and mismanaged permissions.

A1: As for the big tech winner, that has to be video conferencing, and Zoom in particular.

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A1: It used to be that getting an exec to do a video interview required long discussion of how to hook up a webcam and get enough bandwidth. Now, webcam use and conferencing is a basic required skill. And that's just in the last 12 months.

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A1b: And so the enterprise approach has shifted from a technical approach to enabling remote *workers* (VPN etc.), to a digital approach to enable remote *work* for all parties. A lot more energy on workflow, automation, and overall efficiency.

A1. The attack surface has grown exponentially, so even basic things like hardening your routers, keeping anti-virus upto date, centralizing content in one "logically unified" silo are some of the means to meet the security challenges

A1: Inside the firewall threat has grown as well. WFH means working with roommates and family, and some of them may not be benign presences on the home network.

@DavidGewirtz Could not agree more

A1 -- Zoom because a verb during Covid, and that is despite all the incumbents and alternatives, Webex, Skype, FaceTime etc etc. Maybe because of the UX?

Good point, Gorka. When a product becomes a verb, you know you're probably on the right track ... ;-)

A1 -- it's funny how people and organizations started preferring a relatively unknown vendor (Zoom) with unknown security to more established vendors... just for the name of convenience, some cool backgrounds and filters, and a generally better use experience.

@db_graves Sidebar for you, Daniel: How can Delphix's DataOps approach be used in this office-to-home desk new world? Is this something the company is working on?