Can any employee access company resources from anywhere and at any time? It depends on the company’s infrastructure. Recently established businesses have more chances to provide access wherever their teams are. However, companies with legacy architectures need to readapt to have the same time and place flexibility.

Every company infrastructure setup is unique. Therefore, it may require a different approach to solving the same challenges — like how users can access office-based data, applications, or devices while not being present on that particular site.

The most common solution is to choose VPN for security purposes and enablement of distributed teams. However, the VPN selection depends on its type and existing company network arrangement.

If your target is to enable employees to securely connect to different offices and branches of the organization despite being elsewhere, Site-to-Site VPN is the option to explore.

Site-to-Site solution using NordLayer 

Site-to-Site allows users to reach office-bind resources on HQ, your assigned office, or another company branch while not actually being on-site. It is a type of VPN that establishes an encrypted connection to a requested resource on the company network.

Therefore, connection to a single physical location via a virtual private gateway using VPN translates into user connection to all devices and resources assigned to a company router or firewall.

How does NordLayer’s Site-to-Site feature work?

The cloud-based feature can be enabled by connecting NordLayer’s virtual private gateway to the company’s router or firewall.

Moreover, cloud-based Site-to-Site makes it possible to configure a dedicated VPN server to connect to cloud service providers like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure.

Users with VPN access – whether present in the branch office, HQ, or remote – can connect to the company network and access the added internal resources and the on-site devices connected to the router/firewall, even though they don’t support a VPN connection.

• Remote user connection:

• Connection from a company branch:
  

• Connection from HQ:
  

NordLayer’s Site-to-Site feature requires virtual private gateways and physical location configuration. Once it’s ready, a VPN connects users to the local company network and allows them to access company resources like applications, data, computers, or printers.

The same logic applies to users accessing the company’s cloud service provider resources. VPN established connection and router/firewall configuration to support IKEv2 Site-to-Site functionality with a static public IP address can provide access to resources for employees despite their location.

Shortly, suppose an employee for a job needs to access your organization’s customer information stored in a database located in HQ, the email server that stands in an office branch on another continent and needs to print it out while working from home. In that case, it’s all available via NordLayer’s Site-to-Site VPN functionality.

How NordLayer’s Site-to-Site is different?

Traditional WAN companies have an architecture based on an all-to-one setup when business units – remote locations and resources of the corporate – are connected to one main point.

Such organizations exploit extensive legacy Site-to-Site architectures that employees use to connect to the network’s main point, allowing them to access company-enclosed resources from different locations. This type of network architecture delivers interconnectivity yet lacks remote flexibility and has downsides affecting network performance, efficiency, and scalability.

As a solution to legacy Site-to-Site, NordLayer is developed to provide flexible and simple problem-solving to the general downsides of using legacy networking. When focusing on the feature functionality, the distinction between legacy setup and cloud-based remote network access solution comes from overcoming the limitations of traditional Site-to-Site solutions.

Cloud-based NordLayer solution handles legacy infrastructure challenges of increasing remote connections with quick integration to the existing architecture. It reverts performance–efficiency–scalability limitations to company advantage:

• Decreased deployment time and expenses. NordLayer solution is fully hardware-free and compatible with hardware-based or hybrid existing infrastructures. Functionalities can be deployed within minutes and don’t require complex costs and long delivery times, focusing on time-to-value for the organization.

• Maintained security and productivity levels. NordLayer Site-to-Site distributes encrypted user traffic to company resources based on the request nature without affecting connection quality instead of bulk processing all users to a primary point of connection and allocating to requested resources afterward. 

• User traffic distribution. The feature decreases the heavy traffic load directing users to the internet resources, internal data centers, servers, or applications in a more streamlined manner. Therefore, the increased remote user traffic peaks don’t impact performance quality as with a traditional Site-to-Site setup. 

• Efficiency and scalability. Naturally, user traffic distribution significantly reduces on-site equipment use managing the ad-hoc demand to upgrade. On the contrary, cloud-based Site-to-Site functionality enables the company to scale on demand without resource-intensive planning.  

The feature brings another level to team performance in business operations using Site-to-Site. NordLayer’s cloud-based feature ‘helps cut hardware-ing and distance corners’, bringing efficiency to secure data sharing and authorized access of on-site devices within the organizations, even if physically impossible.

Benefits of Site-to-Site VPN 

Primarily, Site-to-Site VPN allows for establishing non-office-only based connections. The VPN enables secure data transfers and trusted user activity between the on-premise network and the public network established over the internet.

Implementing NordLayer on top of your existing infrastructure, Site-to-Site unlocks effective and robust cybersecurity measures for various organizational aspects.

Increased network security

Sensitive data and confidential information is the target of most cyber attacks. Thus, encrypted data transfers between organization members utilizing Site-to-Site, whether in the office or remote, help safeguard against data breaches.

Streamlined business operations

Team performance is heavily related to the availability and capacity of the company network. Therefore, Site-to-Site feature maintains a good speed and stable data traffic flow to provide users with quality connectivity and constant access to resources that influence business continuity.

Flexible and scalable protection

Hardware-free Site-to-Site configuration is a beneficial add-on to the existing company network, even the largely hardware-based ones. Thus, the reaction-to-action time to solve ad-hoc challenges is multiple times shorter and easier. It requires minimal resources and provides a solution based on business needs within minutes. 

Entering NordLayer’s Site-to-Site

NordLayer solution provides a modern approach-based Site-to-Site VPN. The feature allows present and remote employees to access data and devices in multiple corporate environments.

Using our remote network access solution to enable Site-to-Site VPN for the organization, IT admins have to follow simple actions to configure the feature. First, they need to create VPN gateways via the Control Panel as entry points into the network and assign teams or role-based employees to access the gateway so they can enter the company network. Site-to-Site has to be configured for every company unit for the seamless cooperation of teams.

With fewer systems to manage, unlimited scalability, flexibility, and easy setup, companies can ensure smooth and productive connections for their users and maintain high-security levels of the business.

The year was 2023 — three years after the pandemic started (and came close to an end), yet 75% of global workers were fully convinced remote work was the new normal. But what’s the actual status of remote work, and what perspectives does it have?

The pandemic became a massive sandbox that proved people don’t necessarily need to be nurtured by the office culture to be productive.

Workers argue that flexibility is their right whether they prefer to work in the best countries for remote work, like Germany, Denmark, the US, or any other location of their choice if the job is completed as requested. Management counters with the importance of organizational environment and team bond effectiveness created only by the presence in the office.

Both sides have their points, so what’s next — will we return to an on-site-only setup or transition to fully remote? Will more companies compromise on hybrid work after all? Let’s see where the remote work projections are guiding us.

How new is the ‘new normal’ of remote work?

It would be incorrect to say that remote work didn’t exist before 2020. Freelancers were the pioneers of working online — an adventurous and free-spirited career path. Before the pandemic, 2,9% of ‘teleworkers’ globally were exclusively working remotely. For instance, in the US market, only 6% had never worked in any kind of remote work setup.

The scope of work from home mainly spiked because of a safety measure to prevent virus spread. Even though the alertness settled and life started returning to normal, in 2022, at least occasional remote workers reached 62% globally.

According to Gallup research results, only 2 out of 10 people returned to the old routine — entirely on-site jobs. Meanwhile, the rest of 8 out of 10 employees are split between remote and hybrid work arrangements in the US.

The discussion mainly circles whether employees want to work exclusively remotely (49%) or want to share their time between home and the office (46%). Yet the same research reveals that only 6% of employees see the ideal work environment exclusively on-site.

Remote work tendency: to increase or decrease?

The swing in the longevity of time spent at home before and after the pandemic compares drastically. Let’s fact-check.

According to Statista, remote work in the US before the 2020s was a relatively rare yet existing event, occurring 1-2 times per week. However, 3-4 and 5+ days of work from home per week in the post-pandemic period replaced the then-popular 1-2 days/week work from home.

Talking numbers, the remote workforce reached 53%, and the pool of employees that never worked from home decreased by 13% after COVID-19.

The data of the US-based respondents reflects the increasing trend of staying at home rather than working from the office.

2020 was the rush-hour year, so comparing the difference jump from 2019 to 2021, the number remains increasing as the amount of remote workers has tripled. If we take data from 2018-2021, the fully remote workforce grew four times bigger.

How has remote work escalated in Europe? The growing tendency of remote work in European countries is also significant.

Eurostat data from 2019-2021 illustrates the increasing number of employed people spending more and more time working from home. The average of EU Member States climbed from

• 14,6% WFH sometimes or usually* in 2019, 

• 20,9% WFH sometimes or usually in 2020 to

• 24,4% WFH sometimes or usually in 2021. 

In 2021, the usually only working individuals made just a little less than sometimes or usually in 2019 — 13% in contrast to 14,6%. Note that ’usually’ refers to at least half of the work days spent working from home in a reference period of 4 weeks.

The shift is evident in both the US and Europe — remotes were quick to adapt to the circumstances and increasingly function between the office and home, identifying as remote workers.

Let’s not forget that the covid-era introduced a new work-life cultural concept, ‘workation,’ that combines working and vacationing simultaneously. Therefore, it’s challenging to believe that trend swing will take the working world back to the close-to-none remote setup.

Remote work perspective

It’s worth defining the happy medium for understanding remote work. There are different opinions — for some, it’s home-only; for others — home-never. A hybrid work setup seems acceptable for most organizations and employees that can apply non-site work arrangements.

The perspective of hybrid model growth should double from 42% in 2021 to 81% in 2024, according to AT&T findings. The forecast predicts almost one in four Americans will work remotely by 2025.

The prediction is supported by the forecast of conferencing software (like Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet) market growth — in 2021, it reached $14.6 billion worth, and in 2026 is expected to reach as high as $27.3 billion worth. The growing demand shows the need to communicate remotely in the future.

Hybrid work influencing factors

What are the influencing factors for hybrid work escalations — is it just the peer pressure of employees? 83% of professionals say they would decline a job offer without offering flexible work options, according to International Working Group.

Expectations are high as almost everyone (97%) expects organizations to be flexible regarding the work environment. FlexJob indicates that more than half (57%) of organization members would change jobs if they weren’t allowed to work hybrid. After all, 77% of employees see flexibility as the second most important factor after salary in their employment.

The reasoning behind it can be based on preference to save time on commuting, make Mondays less anxious without knowing you must show up in the office at 8 AM, or work from a different city or country.  

Productivity and engagement in remote work

Hybrid or remote work help achieve a better work-life balance that resolves into a positive chain reaction. Employees and organizations notice that staff is exposed to less stress, leading to workers being more present and engaged despite online environments.

It proves that hybrid work isn’t entirely a one-way road. At first, being unavailable to observe employees’ activity on-site might have needed convincing the management of the hybrid work benefits.

According to Zippia’s Remote Work Statistics report, 32.2% of managers agree that productivity has increased after the 2020 remote work shift. Generally, 68% of organizations say there’s been an improvement in employee productivity since the remote work arrangements. 

Return or not to return?

The determination to work remotely is clear for most of the employees. Besides the long list of benefits the workers learned by heart, 20% of the workforce who vouch for flexibility would agree to give up vacation time over office-defined work.

The worth of remote work can be calculated more precisely — a typical organization saves an average of $11,000 per employee yearly if the employee spends half of the working time outside the office.

Saving funds and time open more personal, team, and company opportunities. Organizations have a better chance to scale globally. It brings us to a solution to a raging issue of limited talent pool companies struggle with significantly.

Talent and remote work

Knowledge workers are in high demand to cover the growing need for professionals in all industries. According to Uplers’ research, 69% of companies face a shortage of skilled talent, and geographic limitations are one of the leading factors reserving the reach of the potential talent pool.

According to the Upwork study, companies with remote or hybrid work policies appear to be less negatively impacted by talent shortage — only every third of such organizations see a limited talent pool as a challenge. Half of the knowledge workers who provide computer programing, IT, marketing, and business consulting services to companies are freelancers.

Regarding company size, large companies tend to have a higher demand for talent that turns over with more noticeable talent shortages compared to small or medium-sized companies.

According to Manpower data, 64% of small companies (10-49 employees) struggle to find the right profile workers, while 72% of medium-sized companies (50-249 employees) and 74% of large enterprises (250+ employees) are impacted by a deficiency of skilled professionals.

Remote work by industry

Technological advancements and flexibility allow companies of various industries to adopt hybrid work for its benefit. It’s noticeable that consulting-type services are quicker to move to telecommute. The trend can be justified by the opportunities to unlock markets worldwide, streamline the workload, and better prepare for modern technological setups.

Taking hybrid work through the industry axis, IT is the leading industry to adopt remote work. Finance, customer service, healthcare, marketing, education, and sales industries are primary areas to explore and utilize the benefits of the remote workforce.

Remote work and security

The massive migration to remote work during the pandemic was kick-started for safety reasons. However, home offices opened gaps for cybersecurity vulnerabilities that many companies weren’t exposed to before.

According to Statista, cyberattacks are one of the major risks concerning organizations. Cyber threats increased exponentially with the growing number of unprotected home networks and distributed teams.

The other top risks on the list include human error, cloud computing vulnerabilities, mobile device security, and loss of corporate data and information, as the concerns of organizations in Europe and the US.

Securing hybrid environments

Many organizations proved flexible in times of change — growing cyberattacks and risks were repulsed with security and hybrid work-adapted business solutions. Transitioning to cloud environments allow companies not only to enable remote workers but implement hybrid infrastructure models to support new ways of working.

Circumstances determined businesses’ push to improve network security even though upgrading existing legacy architectures wasn’t in the strategy.

During the later years, evolved Zero Trust security models now define modern remote access and cybersecurity standard. A combination of cloud application security, endpoint protection, and identity management solutions helps protect company assets and users effectively from potential vulnerabilities imposed by remote and hybrid work.

Hostinger is a hosting service provider for developers and their customers. With 1.2 million users worldwide and growing, the company works hard on improving customer support and continues updating its server technology for an even better customer experience. On the side, teams are fine-tuning home-designed hPanel, so the work there runs in a high pace environment.

To support business projects and a large customer base, Hostinger has several departments to maintain all the projects and services up and running. Therefore, originally based in Kaunas, Lithuania, the company now has an extensive team of over 1000 employees in 51 countries across the globe. Yet a large team brings its challenges in times of change. Egidijus Navardauskas, Head of Cybersecurity at Hostinger, gives his insider experience on their journey of implementing remote work in extreme situations.

The Challenge

Rapid organization onboarding to remote work during lockdown

Hostinger as most of the companies in the pre-pandemic time, lived a daily office-based life. However, it changed during Covid as all teams started working remotely and adjusting to the new way of living.

Once the lockdown period came into effect and workforce borders started expanding, the existing VPN solution limitations were revealed. It wasn’t initially built to scale sufficiently and provide a reliable VPN connection to handle the fast growth of remote employees in different countries.

The employee distribution and work from personal networks required the company to grant them a swift connection to internal resources. However, operational continuity was at high risk, and the current setup lacked role-based network access controls for maintaining security levels. 

The Solution

Replace the existing VPN with a more agile solution

The employees used to work from the office all the time, and only a part of the IT staff was using an internal VPN solution as there was no need for most of the teams to access internal resources after working hours. 

Transitioning from an on-site environment to remote work quickly can be challenging for any business. Especially in the case of Hostinger, which experienced a sudden necessity to change its work and infrastructure approach.

Ad-hoc tasks are difficult to squeeze into tight schedules even in extreme circumstances, so time management and efficient distribution of resources are crucial — choosing the right solution from the first shoot is critical.

Therefore, the journey from identifying the issue, selecting a solution, and making the delivery had to be well-organized and smooth.

Why choose NordLayer?

NordLayer provided an optimal solution to change the existing company VPN and seamlessly integrate it into the current infrastructure.

Even though the requirements for a new VPN were extended to establish remote connections of the worldwide-distributed high number of employees to organizational resources and provide secure identity management measures to the IT administrators. 

When selecting a cybersecurity solution, Hostinger usually uses a risk-driven approach, and of course, the solution has to fulfill requirements that are suitable for our company’s needs. Following the practice ensures the organization’s main security goals, which are confidentiality, integrity, and availability of resources and data. 

5 steps to onboard a global remote team overnight: decision-making process and proceeding with NordLayer

Clear steps and objectives helped Hostinger to optimize and streamline its process of problem-solving from understanding the current solution limitations — cannot scale with a growing team,  what are the desired results — provide network access controls, meet compliance and security requirements, and provide backup servers, to overviewing the plan and implementing to the whole organization.

The Outcome

Fast adaptation to a crisis with extended security outcome

The company achieved a remote work setup on time, so business and team productivity weren’t affected. It all happened while facing a global lockdown with time and human resources limitations.

Today, all Hostinger employees use the solution daily as the team works in a hybrid model. We utilize ten private virtual gateways for our company needs — all this just having NordLayer and a 5-people cybersecurity team.

Most importantly, Hostinger employees can connect securely to internal resources no matter where they are. Moreover, the IT staff can focus more on other projects rather than maintaining internal VPN infrastructure — the service provider is responsible for the maintenance of the servers, so it saves a lot of valuable time. 

Pro cybersecurity tips 

The pandemic may start feeling like old news at some point the more time passes by, yet it was an unusual situation that had effects on businesses that reflect up to this day and will stay relevant in the future, like teaching to react to extreme situations to keep businesses running. Even though not everything can be foreseen, thus it’s beneficial to have a strategy and a sound plan in place to be well-prepared.

It’s good to start even from small things — Head of Cybersecurity of Hostinger Egidijus Navardauskas shares his tips for business security:

Have you considered how your organization would hold if stress-tested? What would be the main impediments to securing business continuity? Even expected challenges can bring to light lacking security and adoption of implemented infrastructure. Therefore, it’s always worth exploring the possibilities and performing crisis drills even on paper — be ready to ensure teams and organization perforation despite the work setup, and reach out to learn more about a remote access network solution for modern companies.