AMAZON WEB SERVICES

Enabling Greater
Employee Productivity
in the Hybrid Workplace
A Guide and Assessment for Small and Medium-sized Businesses

AWS SMB | MARCH 2022

Table of Contents

Introduction
What You’ll Learn....................................................................3

Chapter 1
The Work From Anywhere Model Is Here to Stay............4

Chapter 2
How the Cloud Can Help ......................................................7

Chapter 3
Do You Have the Right Tools to Maximize
Secure Employee Productivity? ...........................................9

Chapter 4
AWS Solutions for Remote Work ..................................... 10

Chapter 5
Why AWS for Remote Work? ............................................ 13

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Introduction
About This eBook
This eBook provides information to help business-decision makers in small and medium-
sized businesses understand how cloud solutions can help remote and hybrid workers
maximize productivity and thrive when working remotely.

You’ll Learn:
• How to provide your organization’s employees the ability to easily work, collaborate,
and communicate securely from any location

• What to consider when implementing permanent remote work solutions

• The advantages of using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for remote work solutions

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 CHAPTER 1:
The Work From Anywhere
Model Is Here to Stay
The pandemic was a catalyst for many businesses—
from the smallest to the largest enterprises—to quickly
implement remote work solutions to enable their
employees to stay productive and to get work done in
remote settings. For many, remote work has proven to
be a real and viable option, not just temporarily, but
for the long term. The future of work is hybrid, with 75
percent of remote or knowledge workers saying their
expectations for working flexibly have increased, and
four out of 10 indicating they may leave their jobs if
they’re required to return to the office.1

Many businesses are permanently implementing remote

and hybrid work models as the way forward. The
benefits of allowing employees to split time between
working on-site and remotely are becoming clearer:

• More flexibility for your employees

• Greater productivity for your business
• Better service for your customers
• Easier recruitment of top talent from an expanded
geographic reach
• Reduced facilities and employee travel expenses
• Improved employee work/life balance

We’re now entering the next phase of remote work, as

businesses are combining new and more permanent
practices with ones that they’re already comfortable
with. Remote work is more than just extending greater

1. Gartner, “Future of Work,” 2021.

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flexibility to employees. It is an opportunity for you to improve upon how your business
fundamentally goes about getting work done by rethinking certain business tools and
processes. When enabling a permanent remote workforce, there are challenges that
your solutions will need to overcome, including how to:

• Enable productivity in remote settings: Organizations must make sure that their
workforce stays productive everywhere, on any device. It also needs to be easy for
employees to use tools in remote settings where IT resources are less likely to be
available.

• Maintain effective collaboration: Collaboration is a top IT priority for 96 percent

of small businesses2 because it simplifies and supports productive remote and hybrid
work. Businesses that foster intentional collaboration, either in-person or virtually,
report 75 percent higher levels of team innovation. 3 Yet without having the proper
tools in place, collaboration, innovation, and performance of remote teams suffers.

• Secure a greater attack surface: With remote work comes more locations and
more devices to secure. There’s sensitive data and applications in more places. All of
this creates a greater attack surface that lends itself to more risk of incidents, like
data breaches and ransomware.

• Provide reliable connectivity: Secure connectivity is the foundation for productive

remote and hybrid employees to work with customers, partners, suppliers, and each
other. Unreliable access to applications from any device prevents your employees
from doing their jobs efficiently, creates more calls to your limited IT staff, and
results in costly downtime.

• Scale to handle greater loads: To enable remote work, it’s more than just providing
devices for your employees to use in remote locations. You must ensure your core
business systems can scale quickly to handle greater loads.

2. TechAisle, “Collaboration is 2nd top IT priority for SMBs and the top IT challenge for upper midmarket
firms,” 2021.

3. Gartner, “HR Research Shows Organizations are Eroding Employee Performance and Well-Being with
Virtualized Office-Centric Design,” 2021.

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 Survey data from PWC shows that
executives are recognizing the need to
increase investments to make remote
work successful. Top areas of increased
investment include virtual collaboration
tools (72%) and IT infrastructure for secure
virtual connectivity (70%).5
4. PwC, “It’s Time to Reimagine Where and How Work Will Get Done,” 2021.

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 CHAPTER 2:
How the Cloud Can Help
In the quick shift to remote work, many organizations
leveraged cloud applications and services to smooth
the transition. Cloud provides the on-demand
delivery of compute resources, database, storage,
applications, and other IT resources via the Internet.
Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining your own
data center and servers, you get quick access to the
resources that you need with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Cloud applications and services such as video

conferencing, messaging platforms, cloud storage,
and VPNs have provided support for remote
workforces, regardless of physical location. Some
advantages of using cloud for your remote workforce
include:

• Easier access: Remote employees can share files,

collaborate on projects, and communicate quickly
with messaging and video. The cloud provides
accessibility of shared content and files at any time
and any place from any device.

• Enhanced security: Cloud is built on an

underlying secure infrastructure, making it secure
for remote workers to utilize cloud resources. Data
stored in the cloud is at far less risk for incidents
such as hardware failures or crashes that can occur
on your own site, further strengthening security.

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• More effective collaboration: The cloud facilitates better collaboration between
employees, partners, and customers no matter where they are, through secure file
sharing and meeting. And, many of these tools are designed with intuitive interfaces
and ease of use that require little help from your IT resources for training and
onboarding.

• Flexible scalability: Accommodate the needs of more remote workers as you need
to with the cloud. If you have a sudden requirement to move your entire workforce
to be remote for a fixed period of time, you can do this instantly using the cloud.

• Reduced operational costs: Pay for only the services that you use with cloud, and
if required, you can bring your own license for a consistent experience for your users.
Avoid building out additional infrastructure and buying costly licenses that you may
only need during peak demand times.

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CHAPTER 3:
Assessment: Do You Have a Permanent
Remote Work Strategy in Place?
As organizations look ahead, there is an opportunity to evolve remote work models by
strengthening the tools and security that remote employees use. To plan for the future,
consider these questions to assess where you can make improvements in your remote
work tools. If any of the statements below apply to your company, the cloud can
offer you solutions to help.

W
 e are using different  here is concern about maintaining
T
applications for calling, meeting, control over sensitive company data
and collaborating, which doesn’t that could be on our remote employees’
seem efficient. devices.

W
 e don’t have all of the tools and  caling our VPN is difficult because the
S
processes in place to support a number of remote employees that we
productive remote workforce. have fluctuates.

W
 e must ship laptops to remote  e have a call center, but we’re not able
W
employees for them to access key to enable our agents to work remotely,
files and applications. and we would like to.

W
 e have engineers and designers  e don’t have a plan in place if our call
W
that can’t work with their GPU- center’s call and chat volume outpaces
intense applications from home. our current contact center’s capacity.

W
 e’re running a legacy file share  ur remote employees aren’t always
O
system that is not very conducive able to connect with our customers in
to easy content collaboration the way that they need to.
for our distributed remote
employees. W
 e lack a solid business continuity plan.

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 CHAPTER 4:
AWS Solutions for
Remote Work
AWS empowers you to quickly, securely, and cost-
effectively enable remote work for your employees.
To meet the needs of remote employees, AWS delivers
cloud services that enable them with secure access to
corporate resources from anywhere, ensures corporate
content can remain securely in the cloud, provides tools
to remotely share and collaborate on documents inside
and outside the organization, and delivers a scalable
collaboration and meeting solution that enables virtual
meetings, calling, and chats from anywhere. Deploy
the services that you need tailored to your specific
requirements.

Secure Cloud Desktops

Providing well-equipped laptops and desktops to
remote and mobile workers can be expensive, and
securing, managing, and maintaining them is time-
consuming. Determining the right number of devices
to accommodate changes in user numbers can result in
buying too many of them.

Amazon WorkSpaces replaces traditional desktops with

a managed, secure cloud remote desktop service for
Windows and Linux that gives your remote employees
a fast, responsive desktop experience from anywhere,
at any time, from any internet connected device. There
are several advantages of using Amazon WorkSpaces
over traditional desktop deployment methods and

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virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions. You can instantly scale your
cloud desktop deployment up or down to support fluctuating numbers of
remote employees The high costs and management burden of maintaining
desktop inventory are eliminated, and there is a better TCO over traditional
on-premises VDI systems, which have associated hardware, power, and cooling
costs. And, you have added security since data is not stored on end-user
devices.

Remote Communication and Collaboration

True collaboration is more than just video conferencing. It’s bringing together
all your business activities for continuous teamwork and productivity, no
matter where employees are located.

Amazon Chime offers the ability to meet, chat, share content, and place
business phone calls from anywhere within an integrated secure application.
Teams can work in multiple modes (voice, video, web, messaging) all in a
single place. You get the added benefit of pay-as-you-go pricing for enhanced
features, with no upfront fees or long-term contracts.

Secure Remote Network Access

Traditional VPNs are intended for use when a majority of the workforce is in
the office and most IT services are located on-premises instead of the cloud.
Managing traditional client-based VPN solutions has presented scaling and
operational challenges which are made worse when unforeseen events create
spikes in the bandwidth and connection requirements, causing reduced VPN
availability. AWS Client VPN is a managed client-based VPN service that lets
your remote employees access any authorized company resources, both within
AWS and your on-premises network, without having to install and manage on-
premises hardware and provision VPN clients. Scale the VPN up or down as you
need, based on peak remote work demands.

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Secure Content Collaboration
Legacy network file shares and on-premises enterprise content management solutions
are expensive and complex to maintain. Instead, with Amazon WorkDocs, your
employees can engage in content creation and collaboration no matter where they are
located. With Amazon WorkDocs your remote teams can collaborate on the files from
any device without sending them back and forth.

Application Streaming Service

As employees continue to work remotely, one way to improve that experience is
with application streaming that provides users with instant access to their desktop
applications from anywhere. This simplifies application management, improves
security, and reduces costs by moving your company’s applications from your
employees’ physical devices to the cloud. With Amazon AppStream 2.0, you can
leverage the compute power of AWS and run applications such as CAD, CAM, CAE, 3D
modeling, simulation, games, video and photo-editing software, medical imaging, and
life sciences applications that normally wouldn’t be possible to use remotely on devices
because of GPU, CPU, memory, or storage constraints.

Virtual Contact Center

If you are a business that’s considering using a contact center for stronger customer
interactions or already has one in place, providing contact center agents with the ability
to work remotely has become a requirement. Setting up, configuring, and operating a
contact center, even on a small scale, can be complex and costly. Adding new features
and optimizing workflows can take a lot of time, and many businesses require multiple
solutions to serve the needs of the business, which can add additional complexity.

Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use cloud contact center that helps you provide superior
customer service at a lower cost. Since it’s built on the cloud, as your small business
grows, you can easily grow your contact center and empower agents to work from
anywhere. Little technical skill is required to set up a contact center with Amazon
Connect, and there is no infrastructure to manage on an ongoing basis. Automate
interactions with your customers to reduce the contact rate with your contact center
agents by adding the Amazon Lex chatbot as an initial conversational interface.

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 CHAPTER 5:
Why AWS for Remote Work
AWS is helping customers around the world to enable
collaboration and secure access to applications and
resources to keep businesses going. Reasons why small
and medium-sized businesses are partnering with AWS:

• Security: Security is the fundamental component of

making remote work solutions possible. The AWS cloud
is built to satisfy the most stringent requirements
of the world’s leading institutions, including global
banks and government agencies. You can use this
same infrastructure to protect your data, secure
your applications, and meet security and compliance
standards. While AWS is responsible for safeguarding
the AWS infrastructure from vulnerabilities, intrusions,
and fraud, you as a customer share in securing your
resources by making sure the software, data, and
access that sits on top of the AWS infrastructure is
secure and in your control.

• Scalability: Services can be deployed and used

instantly and scale as quickly as possible. Move your
employees to a remote model in hours, and provision
the resources that you actually need, knowing that you
have the ability to scale up or down.

• Reliability and resiliency: AWS built its cloud

infrastructure and services to be highly resilient and
stable. When you are working remotely, you depend on
being able to access your IT systems and applications,
and any downtime risks loss of productivity. AWS
provides the highest-availability cloud to reduce
your unplanned downtime and maintain reliable
connectivity to your applications and data from
anywhere.

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• Cost savings: With pay-as-you-go pricing options, you can adapt to changing business
needs without minimum monthly fees, long-term commitments or upfront license
charges which saves you money. For additional cost savings, you can receive discounted
rates for reserving a fixed amount of resources that you know you’ll use.

• Performance: Remote employees, such as engineers and designers, may not have the
same powerful workstations at home to run GPU-intensive 3D design and complex
engineering workloads. Rather than ship high-performance workstations out to these
employees, you can use cloud streaming from AWS, which allows a fast and fluid
experience at a fraction of the cost.

Getting Started
Secure your employees wherever they are working and optimize productivity for your
business with remote solutions from AWS. To get started, take these next steps:

• Use self-service resources: With quick starts and tutorials, you can learn how to use
and deploy each solution. Jump right in to get hands-on experience with AWS through
the AWS Free Tier, which lets you explore products through free trials and offers.

• Discover third-party applications: AWS marketplace allows you to extend your remote
work capabilities with software applications that are vetted for quality and authorized
to work with AWS. You can buy application subscriptions through the AWS Marketplace,
making it easier to centrally manage all of your software through a single vendor.

• Work with a partner: Select a partner from the Amazon Partner Network (APN) to get
projects started quickly, and to help you continuously optimize costs.

As you move forward to accommodate the hybrid workplace, use the cloud as a way to lead
the enablement of collaboration, security, and resource access for your remote employees.
The cloud not only provides a seamless transition for your employees to work remotely,
but also helps you to save on overhead costs such as office space, utilities, and travel. Using
a cloud-based infrastructure instead of an on-premises one gives you greater flexibility,
scalability, and security, all in a pay-as-you-go model so that you don’t have to spend
additional dollars to build out for your peak number of remote workers.

Learn more about how to work securely from anywhere.

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