Optimizing the Home Network | Nexthink Library
Earlier this year, as organizations around the world adapted to new remote working environments, Nexthink released a library pack to support IT teams through this transition. The Remote Worker Experience pack introduced a multitude of new dashboards, remote actions, investigations, metrics and Engage campaigns. All with a single objective: monitor, manage and improve the current remote working landscape.
Since then, the notion of full remote working has slowly transitioned to “work from anywhere”, with organizations adopting more flexible working styles. To that end, Nexthink Experience introduced working style filters throughout the Nexthink platform allowing enterprises to manage the digital experiences of employees working in-office, remotely or both.
Experience Optimization: filtering by working style
Although there are many employee IT activities that can be still be managed at a distance, there are some factors that some IT teams simply see as out of their control. For instance, employees’ home network environment – the most important element of digital productivity and satisfaction.
But with the right visibility and capabilities, IT can actually make a positive impact on home connectivity.
Here’s how.
The Home Networking library pack
The Home Networking library pack extends the Nexthink Experience platform with new features to measure the at-home digital experience, in terms of the actual health and speed of an employee’s connection. With half a dozen new dashboards, over 70 new metrics, as well as new remote actions and Engage campaigns, this pack offer comprehensive visibility and context over home networks, internet connectivity and business services connectivity.
With this platform extension, customers can identify low performing home network configurations and take the right course of action to improve an employee’s network health, regardless of location.
Network health, speed and connectivity
The pack looks at employees’ home networks from a wide range of different aspects to facilitate troubleshooting. IT can explore this from a router perspective to analyze Wi-Fi strength, speed and clarity to the local router, looking out for any packet loss along the way. They can also focus on connectivity by testing the connection to the general internet or the corporate intranet data center (UNC). Or, they can look at how servers are responding to calculate page load time and RTT, see what type of connection was used (Wired, WiFi, Cellular…), understand channel health, identify particular locations having an issue and much more.
All these data points provide deep, actionable insight into the health and performance of network connectivity, allowing IT teams to focus on areas of improvement. Even if IT cannot control an employee’s home network hardware and services, they can still retrieve the insight needed to improve their overall IT support with remote actions or customer awareness campaigns.
Geolocation library pack
An additional library pack that pairs itself particularly well with Home Networking is the Geolocation pack. Armed with a single, powerful remote action, it enables IT teams to retrieve key device geolocation insight by public IP (city, country, region…) as well as the name of the ISP. That is a particularly important data-point to have for business environments as IT teams can compare the performance their ISPs are actually delivering against their contractual obligations, allowing IT to hold their ISPs accountable when they don’t deliver on their promises.
This is just another simple example where IT can gain the upper hand with focused insight into elements that are seemingly out of their control.
The importance of a stable, functioning network connection
Needless to say, ensuring employees have a stable home internet—and intranet—connection is indispensable in any flexible working environment.
And while it may seem that employees’ home networks are out of IT’s control, there are, in fact, many elements that can be analyzed, understood and even managed to ensure a home networking infrastructure is optimized for a great remote working experience.
For more details on these product extensions, visit their Nexthink Library pages:
For more technical insight into the Home Networking pack, read the product documentation.
To explore how you can optimize your remote workforce’s home network, schedule a quick demo.
Related posts:
- The Nexthink Library: Q4 Overview
- Powering the Digital Employee Experience for Remote Workers
- Enough! 4 Work From Home Solutions to Heal IT’s Pain
