Remote and hybrid work are here to stay, but working from home
creates A variety of challenges from a technology standpoint.
For HR for compliance, we're speaking with Mark Custodio, the
Director of Enterprise Sales at Verizon about these challenges
and solutions. I get to meet with the largest
global companies in the world at their locations, doing tours of
their facilities and really getting a deep rooted
understanding in terms of how their business operates.
Mark, as you're speaking with your customers talking about
remote work and hybrid work, what are they telling you what's
going on today in this world? Hybrid is here to stay.
That's the first thing you know. It seems like the IT HR
professionals, they did herculean work to get folks to
get home when the pandemic struck.
And I think it probably accelerated many, many years
worth of, hey, we're talking about doing work from home or
talking about these hybrid environments too, right now we
have to how do we do it. And they were able to kind of do
this patchwork to get them to work.
I think they think it's working OK in some instances, but they
have a little bit of concerns around employee experience,
around security risks that they don't really know where to go
yet. What are the shifts or the
changes? That you see these folks going
through in their organizations right now.
I think the first major shift is in the employee mindset.
You know before and it's almost hard to remember, but it wasn't
too long ago where we had to be at work on time, at office, in
the desk. And now I think the latest
statistic is 58% of employees would actually seek a different
job if they weren't able to work from home at least some of the
time. So now it's really put a lot of
control in the employees hand saying, look I have choices out
there. I want the best possible
experience. I want a work life balance.
I also want all the tools that I need in order to be effective at
my job at home. And so it's putting the
companies in a position where OK, we want to embrace this.
How do we give the best experience to attract and retain
our top talent but also ensure that we're meeting our.
You know, productivity goals, our financial goals because it
might be an out of cost in doing this and of course securing
everything end to end. You know now the office is their
home and that's essentially a branch location for these
enterprises. And so now that they've
established a work culture policy essentially enabling
folks to work in their home environment or at a Starbucks or
at an airport or wherever they might be.
They're trying to figure out, OK, what's the right tool set to
give. Broadly speaking, what are some
of the challenges that organizations face as they make
this transition from being exclusively in the office to
remote and hybrid work? You know you mentioned me being
in front of customers a lot, so I can hear first hand some of
the challenges that they're saying that was with a large
insurance company recently and they have many work from home
employees. They're utilizing their own home
Internet connection, which you could imagine there's dozens and
dozens of different providers and they've been experiencing
lots of issues with their VPN just staying connected and lots
of VPN drops. It's been really hard for them
to troubleshoot this because essentially they can look into
their own system, but they can't really look into the home users
network because that's their own home Internet.
They don't have access at an enterprise level to the provider
that's giving them that home Internet.
Even if they call that provider, they're not treated as an
enterprise. They would be calling on behalf
of the consumer and they don't have the rights to do so.
And so for them to be able to troubleshoot at scale, you can
imagine how exponential that problem becomes.
So what customers are saying is how do I get one standard that
not just delivers that good employee experience, but reduces
the IT burden? Because when I get dozens and
dozens of calls that could have dozens of different root
problems across dozens of vendors, it's just not scalable
and I don't have the resources to support that.
So enterprise IT departments are in this position of needing to
manage their own network, but at the same time manage networks
out there among their entire employee base.
You got it, Michael. And you think about the risk
that that entails? You know in your average home
there's probably tons of IoT devices and smart devices and
things that are listening and snooping.
And whether malicious or not, my guess is they don't have all of
the up to date security parameters that a business or an
enterprise would want or would accept on their own network.
So the the biggest recommendation that I can give
is start the conversation of now saying those home offices.
Are an extension of your business.
If you were going to allow somebody to work at a different
location, you have to treat that with the same fervor or the same
rigor that you would do for your own branch location, your own
brick and mortar. Because essentially that user
has the access to the same amount of information they would
have within your four walls. So you have to protect that
information in the same way. The zero trust framework is
becoming more and more prevalent in conversations.
But you really need that visibility end to end and be
able to manage those connections end to end.
And so enterprises are saying, OK, if I own everything end to
end and I have visibility end to end, it's going to help me
across several different vectors, all of those calls to
various different providers. Well, now that anomaly is gone.
I don't have dozens of standards.
I have one standard. In addition, when there's an
issue, I have remote access, remote control, remote
capability to actually diagnose and troubleshoot that challenge.
So by controlling that connection, you create a simpler
environment that's easier to administer.
And at the same time, from a security standpoint, everything
is standardized and so you know what's going on.
That's exactly correct and and I think that's really what the IT
professionals want. HR is really burdened with this
challenge as well. We've seen several states start
to do legislation. I think there's about 11 states
that have legislation. Some are more specific than
others. And if you think about an
organization that spreads across multiple states, they tend to go
towards whatever the strictest standards are.
So if in California, they're requiring you to reimburse for
certain tools that you need to work from home, that often
includes Internet connectivity. And so very similarly to how
corporations. Really have on mass migrated
around, bring your own device. They started to do that trend
many years ago, but it was very difficult to manage.
It started to be very expensive. They were starting to be asked
to give stipends and things like that.
They've really all brought back and said you know we're going to
provide a corporate phone. HR professionals are saying you
know what, we can view this as a benefit.
We can view this as a way to meet our standards across.
We can view this as a way to improve employee experience
because you know, you and I are communicating virtually right
now. And if we don't have a solid
connection, the relationship just doesn't work.
And so giving them that solid connection makes them better at
their job, makes them more effective.
And so there's value across a lot of different work streams
here. We're seeing some early adopters
in call center space. You think about call centers are
not on mass in these giant buildings anymore.
There are many at home. Often they don't have the most
reliable Internet connection is there's been that move to rural
where you don't necessarily have fiber and some of those high
speed connections and then all those other challenges.
So they provide a kit, a kit could include an Internet
connection, some security applications, a void phone and
essentially day one they're on board.
Do they have everything they need to be successful.
What are the considerations around choosing these kinds of
tools? A few things that folks need to
consider. You know, one, it needs to be
easy to operate and easy to deploy because essentially, you
don't have somebody in every home doing a robust setup,
installation, troubleshooting. Many corporations, including
right outside this door at our office, we have, you know, a
help desk. So if you're having a challenge
with your technology, make an appointment, walk up to the help
desk, and we'll troubleshoot that for you.
Well, at home it's not quite so easy, so I think you should look
for something that's plug and play.
Second, something that you can remotely manage, so if there is
an issue, you can diagnose and see what that is.
Third, I think you need to look for something that's scalable.
And what about from a security perspective?
Security means different things to different folks, but
ultimately you need to be able to protect the data that's on
there, you need to be able to protect your end users, and I
think you need to make it a little bit foolproof.
We just released. Our data breach investigation
report and what are we finding? Well, security breaches are on
the rise yet again. So despite many efforts it's
happening more. Many of these breaches are are
organized and many of them are for financial motives.
And so we know that the motives are there to get the information
and often the breach happens with the employee, right that
ends up being the the firewall that's at most risk.
The other thing though is you need to balance that with
employee experience. So you need to put solutions in
place that enable the employee to do their job without having
so many restrictions that it's draconian and they can't access
the sites and the information they need to be successful.
So we can guide through all of that and that's really what it
is. It's a consulting journey where
we look at the outcomes that the customer wants to achieve.
We help them diagnose what products, services, consulting
enables them to achieve that outcome.
And then we deliver a package that's really seamless to that
end user. You mentioned the HR benefits
earlier. Can you be a little more
explicit in linking this kind of connectivity and control that is
obviously so beneficial to it to the value, the benefit, the
employee experience and therefore the HR benefits?
I'm reminded about a visit I did at a large physical security
company. We were walking their facilities
and they had shown literally stacks and stacks and stacks of
expenses, paperwork and timesheets.
They were very antiquated in some of the ways that they did
things where they were faxing information in from each of
their security locations, and whether that be an expense for a
phone, whether that be an expense for Internet
connectivity, whether that be their actual timesheet.
It was all manual in nature for folks to process this.
So one, at an enterprise level, when you're providing these
tools and resources, you can remove all of that necessity for
one, the employee to do expenses.
And by the way, Michael, I've yet to meet an employee that
wakes up in the morning, is excited to do their expense
reports and by the way, sometimes get them kicked back
and audited and all the things that come with that.
So you remove that. Now you're giving them a benefit
that's really easy to manage. I think 2.
You're compliant. So essentially you're providing
those tools and resources. So it's not just compliancy from
the IT and security that we talked about, but compliancy for
the regulation that's in place today and potentially future
regulation as that starts to mature as hybrid and work from
home becomes more and more the standard, not the exception.
And then finally you need to think of ways to differentiate
yourself. So you imagine you're coming
into a brand new job and you might be coming into a brand new
company. Day one, how easy is it when
you're not at a physical office, you're at your home to connect
into the training that you need? How do you feel if when you
connect into that training, it's choppy, it's not reliable, you
can't get the VPN to stay. You're not able to get that
clear communication to learn the information you want.
I think what you're probably going to find is if we're not
adequately equipping those home users, we're going to see churn
tick up very rapidly, employee churn.
Why do I have this prediction? Well, it's pretty simple if my
onboarding experience in those first few weeks is poor, even if
I'm an existing employee. But now I'm working hybrid or
home, and my work experience is not as good or better as it was
when I was in the office. And I now have less physical tie
to a brand or a company because I'm not building relationships
within those four walls. Plus, maybe I have a little bit
of extra time to have on my other monitor.
LinkedIn and Indeed and job searches and monster.com to
search for those. It makes it really easy for me
to find something else. And so we need to be thinking
differently about how we attract and retain talent, how we
develop our folks. That face to face interaction is
now likely a virtual face to face interaction.
So those experiences need to ride on a different type of
infrastructure. And I'll also add I know that
5G. Is going to bring experiences
that weren't possible in the past by a virtual connection,
things that were only possible in face to face augmented
reality and virtual reality. Different ways of training
different types of employees are now becoming more prevalent, so
that need for a more robust connection with really low
latency, so it's a good experience for everybody is
becoming more and more important.
Mark, tell us about the cybersecurity implications.
When you don't own the connection at home, you don't
know what else is riding on that network, what might be causing
risk. But at home, I think most
enterprises have no idea what's riding on that network.
You want to know where the data is going.
Would it interest the organization if they found that
data from that connection was going to another country,
another nation state, a part of the world where they don't do
Business Today? Would it interest them to know
if there were incoming attacks? Would it be interesting for them
to know if certain websites were being accessed?
I think this would be interesting to know, but more
so. You can then create policy
framework and automation. When you own the connection you
can encrypt that end to end. When you own the connection you
can add on analytics that help you search and seek out what's
going on, and when you own the connection you can quickly.
Put in framework that restricts access, allows access.
Put in framework that quarantines that does all the
things you would expect in an enterprise environment.
Mark, what about the privacy and the compliance implications or
benefits from using this type of connectivity?
That needs to be at the forefront of everything we do,
because employees aren't going to be happy if we're invading on
their privacy. Having a dedicated Internet
connection means. You don't have that risk at all.
The connectivity that you have for your business products, your
business solutions, your laptops, your phones, your
tablets, whatever connectivity that you're using, their VoIP
phones, that's segmented off from their home Internet.
And so now you don't have to worry what they're doing on
their network. They don't have to worry about
how they're monitoring their network.
It's under the same policy and framework.
So that makes it really easy. But if you flip that and you
say, OK, well, if I want to add these types of security
solutions and I don't own the Internet connection.
Well then, what risk does that put me in, in terms of what data
I'm collecting on my employees? What risk does that put me in,
in terms of how their perception may be of how I'm monitoring?
If they're doing something malicious or wrong or have a a
security breach on their phone, that's their personal I don't
want to put my information at risk or vice versa.
And by the way, employees think the same.
Hey, I want to be able to access information, but I don't want
you seeing what I do on my personal device.
Let's segregate that. Let's make sure there's a fence
and we don't have to worry about personal information and work
information. We have dedicated lanes and I'll
tell you once you do that, it's so empowering for the company
because it can enable a better experience.
An example might be, let's build a private network.
So maybe you don't need that VPN anymore.
Maybe the moment you authenticate that device.
To your Internet connection, it just immediately connects.
And so these are things that we can do or maybe we do a private
network with a VPN and add a completely different layer of
security. Maybe we say, you know what,
we're going to prioritize certain bits of data or
applications just like we would do in an office location.
So because we own the Internet, we're going to put a little bit
of priority on that VoIP phone so you get the best experience
on your voice. And you know any other
applications like YouTube and things like that or more best
effort, These are things that you can start to think about
when you own the connection and you have the applications, the
hardware that's wrapped around it.
Given the importance of employee training around issues such as
phishing, what resources can you recommend for folks that are
listening to learn more and to help their employees?
On our website, we have a great Internet portal, the Verizon
Business Internet. It gives great information at a
high level as to some of the recommendations we have for
this. In addition, and this is really
the most important thing that you can do, let's start with a
conversation. I heard Danny Johnson who's head
of one of our product marketing divisions.
He made a great analogy that the most important investment that
you can make, if you're listening to this as a business
leader, as an IT professional, as an HR professional.
Is the investment of your time. Because at the end of the day,
there's unlimited upside to what that conversation can bring and
there's very little risk, there's very little downside.
You're just investing in conversation.
So let's have a conversation meet with your professional.
We have folks that are assigned to almost every business that's
out there. We'll have a conversation.
We'll understand what your goals are because that training may
not be A1 size fits all. There's different levels of
maturity and outcomes that the customers are looking for.
We can design a solution for that.
Now for companies that are a little bit more advanced or
looking for more something holistically, we have world
class business consulting services.
We're on retainer for some of the largest companies in the
world where we do specific trainings, red table events for
example, where we simulate some very sophisticated attacks and
we utilize this information because.
The data breach investigation report, I think this year it's
maybe something like 15 or 17,000 data breaches that we
investigated that we ingested and then gave analytics on.
So we see what happens across networks around the globe.
We see how these things are manifested and then we know how
to prevent and if it does happen, how to respond very
quickly. And so we're able to consult and
do the training at any level and increase that adoption.
And so we encourage you to work with us.
We really are experts when it comes to this.
The network, the security, the applications that are all within
there and we'll help you get the outcomes you're looking for.
Mark clearly the solution demands both technology,
infrastructure as well as employee training.
I would completely agree, and the technology infrastructure
should at some point become so easy that the employee training
could just be a simple card that they receive that says plug in.
And play and that's literally the extent if something doesn't
work, contact here. And so it makes it very easy for
that employee to see the experience.
But I think awareness as well as training is very, very
important. You need to be aware that at
least from a security standpoint, these risks exist
and there's things that we can all do in our personal and
professional lives to ensure we're living the most secure and
reducing the risk as much as possible.
So awareness is really important.
I think businesses need to continue to do that, double down
on awareness campaigns, let them know what's going on.
If there's a breach that occurs, let that happen.
And by the way, all of that information is publicly
available for free. We have a mobile breach report,
a data investigation report, and folks can use that information
to help train and make aware of their employees.
And then. Second to that is let's ensure
that now that they're aware, how do you respond, what do you do
when something occurs And by the way, what's the investment that
we're making in you to make it easy so that doesn't happen?
Again, that creates employee loyalty because the employee
recognizes the investment that the organization is making in
their well-being and in their skills.
No doubt. And when you think about that
importance of data, protecting the employees, data protecting
the company's data, if you look, if it's a global organization,
you think about some of the GDPR requirements that are on there,
the image brand and financial implications that that could
happen if we're not adequately protecting that data.
This is not an if it's really a must, we must do these things,
not just. From a governmental policy
standpoint, but from what we do is terms of the right things for
our employees and our customers that serve.
I know when I'm negotiating a large agreement with our
customers, this is a question they ask us now.
I'm very proud of our record and the things that we do.
And so we can talk about those things and customers are very
satisfied with the steps that we put in.
And then in that conversation says, well, here's how we can
help you do the same. And I encourage any organization
as they're contracting with a company to do that.
I think it's table stakes to make sure that you're partnering
with somebody that you know preaches what they practice and
practice what they preach. Mark, let's talk about
implementation. You speak with so many Verizon
customers, very large organizations, organizations of
every size. What are some of the best
practices that you see for implementing remote work?
Process is really important. What you want to do is enable
some of this technology to either work before it arrives
and you can accomplish that a few different ways.
So one some companies either do internally or they outsource
staging and kidding, where essentially the device is set up
to the industry or the company's standards before it's shipped
out to that end user. So that process of when the end
user receives it, it just works. That needs to happen now.
In addition, there's some automation you can do with that.
You know, for example, we see that with smartphones where we
can actually enable what's called a supervised mode on that
device. We ship out that smartphone or
tablet to the end user the moment they turn it on and it
authenticates with the network. It says, hey, this is corporate
owned, here are the policies that need to be on here and it
just works. You can also do that with a
router device. Now depending on what those
requirements are, some companies also say, you know what, we're
going to put some custom information in there.
I mentioned that card that kind of explains plug in and play.
Let's go ahead and include those instructions and then if
something doesn't work, here's how you contact.
So that process is the number one best practice I see.
Another part of that process that I see that's really, really
important is doing qualification in terms of what the experience
might be from a coverage standpoint at that home.
So although you know, we cover 99% of the US population, I'm
certainly not going to sit here and say in every building, in
every nook and cranny at every location are we going to have
great coverage. But what we do have are some
geospatial analytics and a wealth of information that can
give a pretty good indicator as to whether there's coverage
there. If it's an enterprise office
location, you know, we typically come in, we do a site survey, we
do readings, we might install an external antenna, we do things
to ensure the best possible experience.
But when it's a home user, you need to use as much intelligence
beforehand as possible. Now the good thing is, again,
this can be automated and easy. We get the addresses from the
end users. We then spit out a range that
says this will be a good experience, a great experience,
a poor experience. And then the company can make a
decision. Is this the right solution for
that home user? Or do we need to augment with a
booster? Or maybe this isn't something
that we can install at all? So up front, doing the work to
have a process in place, we'll ensure success when the end
users receive it on the back end.
And you know, I say look, start small, let's do a pilot
together, pick a hundred 200 users and let's get their
feedback. And we are finding very, very
high success. But we're also learning, hey,
with this application, here are the settings that we need to do.
Here's what's going on with the VPN.
Hey, here are the policies that we need to do so when you go to
scale, it ends up being the best possible experience.
Mark, as we finish up, where is hybrid remote work going and
what are the technology advancements that we're going to
see in in the near future? It's here and I think it's going
to be here for the long haul. I don't see us ripping back that
Band-Aid. I do see us doing more
purposeful experiences in our corporate offices to kind of
draw people in and build that engagement.
I was listening to 1 customer that said, you know what, we're
not going to have as much real estate, but what we're going to
do are events. So maybe every quarter we do a
really big event. We take some of the money that
we saved on that real estate. They're now working from home,
but we do things that are really purposeful to bring people
together. So I think.
This hybrid mindset, while still having some brand identity, some
culture identity is going to be there.
Majority of the time though, folks are going to be working
from their houses and so how will the technology advance?
Well, you know right now you and I have a great connection.
It's true high definition. I can see in great fidelity.
I can see the facial expressions that you have.
It doesn't look grainy. That's accomplished by you and I
having really strong Internet connections and a great
platform. By and large, much of the
technology that folks are utilizing today at a video
conference isn't even full HD today.
And so I think there's opportunities we're going to see
as connections become more robust, as 5G and fiber become
more prevalent across the country, it enables us to really
uptick the quality. Then on top of that, you're
going to see more and more augmented reality where we see
of ways of connecting and engaging with folks differently.
So that doesn't just require bandwidth.
That requires latency because our eyes have excellent latency.
We're able to pick up things really quickly and smoothly on a
video screen that's attached to your head.
That requires an even greater grade of that.
So I think as more and more folks are working from home,
having those applications pushed closer to them, so there's that
great experience is important. That's where things like mobile
edge compute come in, having applications like that augmented
reality application. Closer to the tower, closer to
the cell site, closer to the network.
So that experience and that response time is really
seamless. So I think the applications are
really broad. What most excites me and I think
about this all the time when we launched 4G, when Verizon said,
hey, we're going to have a nationwide 4G network.
At the time that gave us 5 to 12 megabits per second.
Which may not seem like a lot now, but was groundbreaking at
the time. I mean, most folks were between
600 kilobits per second and maybe a Meg, a Meg and 1/2.
So going to 5 to 12 was groundbreaking.
Well, what did that do for us? You think about some of the
businesses that were transformed.
The easiest example might be, you know, Uber and Lyft, they
ended up creating applications that rode over the top of our 4G
network that completely disrupted the way that we travel
in the taxi industry. You couldn't do things like that
before because you didn't have a robust enough or reliable enough
connection. We built a network that enabled
that to work ubiquitously wherever you are and that's just
one of thousands of new businesses that were created.
So I'm most excited about the new businesses that are going to
be created, the new disruptions that are going to be created,
the developer community once they have these capabilities
that 5G really starts to usher in.
Are going to be unleashed just like they were with 4G.
And we're going to see experiences that you and I can't
even fathom today that are just going to change the way that we
work, play and engage with each other.
It's exciting to imagine what's coming next.
Marc Custodio of Verizon. Thank you so much for taking
time to speak with us today. Thank you so much, Michael.
It's a pleasure. I'm so excited to talk about the
future of work and can't wait to talk to you again.