Replify has always allowed staff to work from home if they need to and we’ve had the infrastructure to allow that to work. We’ve secure VPN access to the office and have been using collaboration tools such as Office365 and Slack for years. We even had Zoom accounts before it was fashionable.

Previously, staff would only work from home occasionally. For example, to focus on a task without interruption or because they were expecting an important delivery. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we all took our laptops home and continued working from there with no disruption.

Not all businesses have this luxury. In the early days of the pandemic, we made several sales to companies who needed Replify Accelerator to accelerate access to essential services for home-workers. You can read about some of these in our case studies.

Many other companies muddled along making the assumption that this disruption would only be for a few months and they’d “get through it”. Many of these companies didn’t assume the pandemic would last for so long, didn’t plan for a possible second wave and certainly didn’t plan for a future where the majority of staff working from home for most of the time was the “new normal”.

As time moves on, the “getting through it” approach is starting to show cracks and businesses need to take a long hard look at how they provide essential services for their staff. With the money that can be saved by moving to smaller premises, companies can finally get round to migrating services to the cloud and upgrading to newer technologies such as SD-WAN or SASE.

This type of digital transformation was likely a long term plan for many, but is now being brought forward. These plans were probably assuming a high-quality network infrastructure, centred around office locations. They were made in the days when the poor broadband of staff who lived in the countryside was only the concern for those members of staff. Covid-19 has made it a corporate concern and therefore WAN optimization really needs to considered a core part of any digital transformation plan.

Replify Accelerator provides a quick and easy solution here. It can be deployed very quickly, either on-premise or in the cloud (or both). It can work alongside other network products and is very cost effective with a flexible pricing model. Why not contact us to find out more.