Post-pandemic telework infrastructure

• By Troy K. Schneider
• May 25, 2021

With a year of telework experience and the prospect of hybrid remote-office operations on the horizon, IT leaders are drafting plans for long-term secure access and more effective collaboration.

A group of federal IT leaders recently gathered to explore approaches to IT infrastructure challenges. The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see sidebar for the full list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here's what the group had to say.

A full 12 months into maximum telework when the mission allows, the participants agreed that structuring most systems to be location-agnostic was no longer the issue and that a solid foundation was in place.

One surprisingly persistent question participants wrestled with was how much hardware to provide for remote workspaces. "It's really fine-tuning what telework means, not only from the standpoint of does your position allow you to work full-time from home but then what are the additional tools that you need?" one official asked.

Employees at that agency have been given headsets, "and they've also been able to go to the office and take their wireless keyboard and mouse home and things like that," a participant said. "But when you look at the private sector, they've been giving stipends and providing funding to build your own office."

Agencies have provided computers and mobile devices, but employees are increasingly asking for "the same things they had in the office," one participant said. "They started saying things like 'I want three monitors to plug in at home,' or 'How about an office chair?' So we've been dealing with policy stuff and trying to formulate what we should be providing and what we should not."

No telework without telecom

Another unresolved challenge is secure and sufficient connectivity. "The only pain point we had when we had everybody go remote was the bandwidth," one official said. "Because of the Trusted Internet Connections program, everybody had to go to our cloud through our trusted internet connection. And we had to really scale it up."

That experience was not uncommon, another official confirmed, adding that "some agencies were waiting on the TIC remote-user use case to be released for the acquisition process to start."

With the increased importance of videoconferencing and real-time document sharing, another said, "we need to drive forward to Class 5 routing. If you're really going to want to have some people audio, some people video and assemble the workforce on multiple security planes, maybe direct dialing is one of the aspects we really need to get to empower the workforce. It's one of the deficiencies that we're trying to prioritize."

"You can't have telework without a focus on telecom," another official said. "And the federal space especially has allowed itself to be almost in vendor lock with small office building-based solutions that CIOs traditionally have a very hard time federating across the physical space and virtual space. I think it's time the federal government starts to follow the commercial example for centralized carrier-based telecom solutions and away from these small office PBX exchanges. It's about 10 years behind the interoperability and open standards of the transport layer. It's long overdue."

"The workforce has shifted from inside-the-building-out to outside-the-building-in, and we spent decades hardening the building and compartmentalizing all our information," another official said. "As you start to merge the application layer, there are strict prohibitions to video, for example. And as we collapse the edge, we're finding a lot of incompatibility, and we're excluding our workforce. So our roadmap is to really focus on what's an inside-the-building versus an outside-the-building mission and try to enable those efforts."

There are also specific processes, such as digital signatures, that continue to cause friction. "We have a remote desktop that you can log into and do digital signatures," one participant said. "We can't do digital signatures virtually, and that's been a big problem, especially if you're an executive where you're signing official documents. I'm constantly logging in through a Citrix connection to access local resources to do digital signing of documents and things like that." The tension between security and productivity is still there, so "how do you adjust your workflows to accommodate that?"