Empowering hybrid working

Hybrid working is here to stay

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted business as usual, accelerating significant changes to every aspect of life, including to the nature of work and how it’s organised. As enterprises turned to remote working to navigate this new reality, an important paradigm shift began to unravel: work is no longer confined to a physical location. Today, while some organisations are seeking to reduce levels of remote working, it’s far from being over. In fact, many employers have developed corporate policies for the post-pandemic world of hybrid working—a term used to describe the mixture of remote/home and on-site/office working.

This report focuses on hybrid working and the opportunities it presents for telecoms operators to support their enterprise customers as they adapt for the long-term. We believe that operators can and should expand their role in assuring hybrid working is optimal. They should build on connectivity provision, through applications and all the way to workforce empowerment. We define the latter as providing end-to-end support to enterprise customers evolving their organisations to a thriving hybrid working environment- this can include best practice process design, advisory services, privacy-compliant user analytics, coaching and end-to-end solution delivery.

To inform our thinking, we have conducted a global enterprise survey with 400+ respondents and an interview programme with 11 telecom operators. The research has confirmed what we have already observed anecdotally and in existing studies (e.g. home working to become a legal right in the Netherlands) — hybrid working is here to stay. Employees seem to be embracing this change with open arms: ~ 79% of survey respondents indicated that, for the most part, their teams have some members working from the office/on-site and some working from home/remotely. In fact, the majority of employees surveyed (54%) claim to have some autonomy over the location from where they work while a further 36% indicate that they have total autonomy over this issue. The interview programme with telecom operators echoed these findings as all 11 interviewees mentioned that they practice hybrid working.

When it comes to employees’ experiences with hybrid working, the surface level findings show that across the board, people are generally quite satisfied. When asked to evaluate its impact on the quality of their lives, 91% of survey respondents said that it has been overall positive. This figure was slightly lower for people working in HR and Sales and Marketing roles. The biggest benefits of hybrid working, as stated by survey respondents, included reduced commute time, greater autonomy over one’s schedule/time, as well as fewer distractions and interruptions.

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Top benefits are reduced commute time and autonomy over one’s time

Source: STL Partners

On top of this, according to the survey, hybrid working has helped organisations attract more talent for existing roles and appeal to a wider talent base:

Hybrid working has allowed my organisation to…

Source: STL Partners

Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Hybrid working is here to stay
  • Workforce empowerment: A telco opportunity
  • Why are telcos well positioned to enable workforce empowerment?
  • Conclusion: CSPs shouldnt waste the hybrid working opportunity
  • Index

Related research:

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Cloud 2.0: Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) vs. Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Network Functions Virtualisation

What is Network Functions Virtualisation?

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV)  is an ominous sounding term, but on examination relatively easy to understand what it is and why it is needed.

If you run a network whether as an enterprise customer or as a service provider you will end up a stack of dedicated hardware appliances performing a variety of functions needed to make the network work or to optimise its performance. Boxes like Routers, Application Load Balancers, Session Border Controllers (SBC), Network Address Translation (NAT), Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and Firewalls to pick just a few. Each one of these hardware appliances needs space, power, cooling, configuration, backup, capital investment, replacement as they become obsolete and people who can deploy and manage them leading to on-going capex and opex. And with a few exceptions, each performs a single purpose, so a firewall is always a firewall or an SBC is always an SBC and neither can perform the function of the other.

Contrast this model with the virtualised server or cloud computing world where Virtual Machines run on standard PC/Server hardware, where you can add more compute power/storage on an elastic basis should you need it and where network cards are only required when you connect one physical device to another.

What problems does NFV solve?

NFV seeks to solve the problems of dedicated hardware by deploying the network functions on a virtualised PC/server environment. NFV started as a special interest group running under the auspices of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) by 7 of the world’s largest telecoms operators and has now been joined by additional telecoms companies, equipment vendors and a variety of technology providers.

While NFV can replace many dedicated hardware devices with a virtualised software platform, it is yet to be seen if this approach can deliver the sustained performance and low latency that is currently delivered by some specialised hardware appliances such as load balancing, real time encryption or deep packet inspection.

Figure 8 shows ETSI’s vision of NFV.

Figure 8 – ETSI’s vision for Network Functions Virtualisation
Network Virtualisation Approach June 2013

 Source ETSI

Report Contents

  • Network Functions Virtualisation
  • What is Network Functions Virtualisation?
  • What problems does NFV solve?
  • How does NFV relate to Software Defined Networking (SDN)?
  • Relative benefits of NFV and SDN
  • STL Partners and the Telco 2.0™ Initiative

Report Figures

  • Figure 8 – ETSI’s vision for Network Functions Virtualisation
  • Figure 9 – Network Functions Virtualised and managed by SDN
  • Figure 10 – Network Functions Virtualisation relationship with SDN