In fact, the reality is quite the opposite. Many employees, and more than a few managers, regard this essential business support service as “annoying,” “slow” and “only heard of when something is going wrong.”

This is not because of any personal issues that employees might have with the IT team — it is simply that they only interact with this part of the business when they are having a problem. Quite often frustration rises when things aren’t fixed instantly — when the simple reality of the situation means they can’t be.

Don’t hate the IT team, hate the substandard tech they have at their disposal

When it comes to business IT and desk-side support services many issues reappear time-and-again causing employees to get frustrated with their IT and/or the people responsible for maintaining it. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most hated aspects of IT and desk-side support in the modern office environment.

#1 The Deskside Support is Helpless

You might be the king of your day-to-day job, but nothing makes you turn into a pauper quicker than when your IT system crashes or your device stops working (which always happens at the worst time!).

When this happens, you look to the IT desk-side support team as your knights in shining armor riding in to save the day. Yet when they arrive, you discover that they will have to take over your device and “have a play around” to figure out the problem.

This can take a long time, and time is a precious commodity. Sitting around watching IT support perform tests on your device frustrates workers and gives the impression that the IT team doesn’t know what they’re doing. The reality is many of these problems require these “exploratory” tests to be carried out to identify the problem before it can be fixed.

You wouldn’t be frustrated with a Doctor performing tests to identify why you’re feeling under the weather.

#2 IT Projects Never Seem to End

IT infrastructure is under constant monitoring, revision and improvement. Patches and updates are necessary in order to keep the business secure.

Add to this the unplanned IT issues — failure, lost, damaged items — and you should begin to understand why IT desk-side support can sometimes take time to resolve. Even worse is what most of us have experienced at some point — twiddling our thumbs and watching our device under the control of the remote IT support team when you need to be working on that report, proposal or other important document/ project. This wasted time leads to lost productivity in the workplace and reduced employee morale.

#3 Employee On-Boarding with No IT equipment on Day One

Anyone who has gone to work in an office as a new starter in the last decade will understand the frustration of the “new employee IT onboarding process.”

Even though you’ve had months of interviews and your agreed start date is not a mystery or unexpected, imagine the frustration when you walk through the door for your first day feeling confident, but nervous and your computer is not fully set up for use.

Instead, you end up sitting around watching your new colleagues get stuck into the work they want to be doing, while you’re waiting for your computer to be fully configured. Praise Be for that “team lunch” will help break up the monotony of the first day.

The configuration of IT assets should be completed before the first day. It should be waiting for them from day one.

#4 Hardware Refresh Cycles

Getting a new, improved, more up-to-date device should be a day of joy for workers as you say goodbye to your slow, unreliable equipment that looks like it has just arrived from the late noughties.

One client I worked for actually embraced the embarrassment of how old its IT equipment was by naming its most ancient range of hand-me-down laptops as “Heritage Laptops.” I did think that what would come next would be a UNESCO “World Heritage” badge stating the equipment was now considered “IT equipment of significant historic value.”

This process of switching from an old to a more modern device is not just simply handing over a laptop for a new one. The new device still has to be configured and cloned to your settings and then tested to make sure everything is running smoothly — which can lead to new problems.

For the business, these processes are a short-term pain for the long-term gain. However, for employees, it can be seen as a dull, unnecessary experience that some will actively avoid, preferring to stay on older, slower, less secure devices.

A new, user-friendly system is needed to make this process smoother and simpler for employees to be a part of, and it needs to be much more convenient than it currently is.

#5 Where is my order?

It used to be that work IT and desk-side support was far better than what we had at home. Some of us might even be old enough to remember a relative or parent proudly coming home with a wonder of technology which they had “borrowed from work.” Much to the amazement of the family.

Nowadays this has completely changed. Each of us carries a super-computer in our pocket and uses seamless “omnichannel” services provided by retailers. Whether this is from tech giants like Amazon or Apple to luxury brands like Burberry or even high street names like Argos. With each of them, whenever you place an order you are presented with a wealth of information about where your item can be collected, when it will arrive, and whether you want to delay arrival — right down to the name of your delivery driver.

Take this experience back to the workplace and you are met with the “black hole of IT.” Every time you order IT equipment it disappears into the ether. You might get a confirmation notice, but how often do you receive an update on how the order is progressing, or how you will eventually collect your item? Do you know the name of the person in your IT support team working on this order?

The answer to all these problems = Automation

One thing each of the above issues has in common is that at some point they rely on a human touchpoint in the process to get anything done.

Whether this is calling a member of the IT support desk, waiting for IT support to make an office visit, or waiting for engineers to finish configuring your machine before you get it back, much of the problem-solving within business IT is done in front of the employees.

This no longer needs to be the case! Automation paired with the use of consumer systems like Smart Lockers, can remove many of the pain points within IT projects. The impact is quickly realised as the IT team has time back to get on with important business-changing projects and employees have the ability to self-serve/ self-solve their own IT issues.

Hassle-Free, Headache-Free IT Support

IT infrastructure will always be a key component of any modern office or business environment, which inevitably means that IT support will always remain a part of employees’ lives.

Much has been made about AI and automation removing the need for human interaction within the workplace, but rather than replacing IT support staff outright, automation using Smart Lockers removes the mundane, time-consuming and repetitive tasks.

The wider workforce now benefits because their IT problems get fixed much quicker, in fact, research has shown that Smart Locker requests are up to 95% faster than traditional deskside support teams; the three-day average wait time is now down to mere minutes.

Moreover, it also removes the headaches of sitting around for hours at a time while an issue is resolved. It also plays heavily into the reputation of employers if they can automate a lot of repetitive processes, presenting a business in which ongoing, recurring IT issues are a thing of the past.

Glen McCarty serves as the Consulting Director at Velocity Smart Consulting, bringing to the table a career spanning two decades as a seasoned IT transformation specialist.

The post Five Common IT Issues Everyone Hates at Work appeared first on My TechDecisions.

However, implementing zero trust can seem like a daunting task given how zero trust is a policy and not a tool or solution that can achieve that level of security all at once. An organization’s zero trust strategy should be constantly evolving and becoming more secure over time. There are a variety of different technologies and solutions that are designed to address zero trust principles, but there is not one solution that achieves them all.

That’s why we spoke to Chalan Aras, managing director of Deloitte’s Cyber and Strategic Risk unit, about where organizations should begin on their zero-trust journey. The interview comes after Deloitte released the results of a survey on challenges of zero trust adoption, which found that compatibility issues with legacy systems is the greatest challenge to zero trust adoption.

Solving those complex issues and implementing zero trust can seem challenging, but IT leaders can begin their organization’s zero trust journey and take first steps in a few key areas, Aras says.

Assess the current infrastructure

According to Aras, organizations should begin by assessing their current IT infrastructure, which has undoubtedly changed and become more complex over the last few years as organizations adopted cloud solutions in response to the pandemic and remote work.

In addition, changes to company structure such as mergers, growth or divestitures can make IT environments even more complex. This mix of legacy systems and cloud technologies makes visibility so much more important, Aras says.

“Not every IT leader has a full picture of what they have,” Aras says. “I think it’s a good investment of time and resources to get a basic landscape of where you are.”

In addition to zero trust considerations, assessing the current IT environment can give IT leaders a better sense of where security gaps exist, which can be addressed before embarking on a zero-trust journey.

Identity and access management

After developing an overview of the current IT infrastructure, a good place to start implementing zero trust policies is identity and access management. According to Aras, zero trust is heavily driven by securing identities, but IT’s first step should be defining those users and assign them profiles and groups based on level of access.

Aras calls that work a “foundational element” of zero trust architecture. Deloitte’s survey also found that identity and access management was the second most important priority when implementing zero trust. First was data security, but Aras calls data insecurity the consequence of insecure identities.

Controlling and securing identities allows for better data security to control access to that data.

“Before the pandemic, you didn’t know who was doing what, and people could be copying and downloading valuable enterprise data,” Aras says. “Data security is the outcome, but to get there, you need identity and access management.”

Identity profiling, role definitions and application mapping should then be implemented on a modern identity system, Aras says.

VPN elimination

Virtual private networks (VPNs) were once thought to be a viable secure remote access solution for enterprises, but they can’t scale or provide sufficient security for distributed workforces, experts say. That’s why Aras says eliminating VPNs in favor of zero trust-based access is a common first step in implementing zero trust.

According to Palo Alto Networks, VPNs were designed to grant complete access to a LAN via a private, encrypted tunnel for remote employees to connect to the corporate network. However, this then gives a user access to anything on the network, leading to security gaps and policy enforcement issues, as well as a lack of visibility into a user’s access.

IT analyst firm Gartner, for example, says Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) is quickly eliminating the need for VPNs for secure access, with the analyst firm predicting that by 2025, 70% of new remote access deployments will be served by ZTNA compared to VPN services.

“VPN elimination to zero trust-based access tends to be a very high-value first change,” Aras says. “At that moment you gain better visibility and you can apply things like continuous authorization and reviews, and you can apply fine-grained policies.”

Where SASE fits in

Much has been made of secure access service edge (SASE) deployments in recent headlines as tech vendors begin to release all-in-one, single-vendor SASE solutions designed to take the complexity out of the equation.

While zero trust is a strategy or policy designed to eliminate automatic trust from a network by scrutinizing access at a granular level, SASE is the technical framework with which organizations can move closer to zero trust network access (ZTNA), Aras says.

According to Gartner, SASE delivers converged network and security as a service capabilities, including SD-WAN, SWG< CASB, NGFW, and of course, ZTNA.

“SASE is primarily delivered as a service and enables zero trust access based on the identity of the device or entity, combined with real-time context and security and compliance policies,” Gartner says.

From there, organizations can begin to think about application segmentation and other more advanced actions.

Zero trust is a journey

With threat landscapes and IT environments constantly changing, organizations should not be complacent in their current stage of zero trust implementation. However, before they take thier first steps in implementing zero trust, IT leaders need to understand they can’t make these sweeping changes overnight.

“It is a multi-part journey,” Aras says, adding that IT leaders must also consider the end-user impact of zero trust implementations.

Alongside end users, IT leaders must also consider their organizations’ business needs as the organization grows.

For example, a business could begin working with more third parties, service providers or vendors that need some level of access, thus requiring zero trust to be applied to that growing complexity.

“Part of the journey is understanding how your business operates within this next context and applying zero trust to your current needs,” Aras says.

The post First Steps to Take for Zero Trust Implementation appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The problem is most companies do not typically update their office AV setups. While equipment promises a long life, even up to a decade, once you’ve had a piece of hardware for five years, it might start to feel outdated and end up costing you time.

Updating technology to avoid these problems is more important now that our remote and hybrid working lives rely so heavily on tools. Yet, our propensity to upgrade hasn’t caught up with our workplace behaviors. About 34% of employees report that their employers are not prioritizing investments in better hybrid working technologies, according to a study by Barco.

Pre-pandemic, in a mid-size company with 10 conference rooms, there might have been two rooms that needed a fully equipped AV system. Now, pretty much every room in the workplace needs to be ready to provide a high-quality AV experience.

Updating tech can not only help solve problems and save time, but it can also level up the experience of meetings and give employees that extra boost of productivity and inspiration.

What Kind of AV Technology Needs to Be Upgraded?

In short, you need to update whatever pieces of hardware and equipment that are important for your setup. If something isn’t upgraded, it could cause wasted time.

Camera and microphone systems are the major must-haves for a reliably great AV experience. That could mean upgrading to camera systems that can pan around the room based on who is talking or multiple microphones across the room that can focus the input of the audio toward particular speakers.

As part of the Barco study mentioned above, interviewees were asked what kinds of technology they felt needed upgrading. Videoconferencing capabilities were a big request, with 77% of respondents believing that all meeting rooms should be set up with videoconferencing technology.

Then, there are tools in which upgrades will take your work to a new level. Touchless technology, for example, could drastically streamline your meeting practices. Integrate your call system with your AV system and have a one-touch meeting start, seize the energy in the room, and start right on time.

Technology that empowers hybrid and remote workers is also crucial. Per Barco, 35% of employees would like to have personal touchscreen devices, for example, and 36% want tech that enables them to use their laptops as the centers of their in-office and home-based work.

What Can Teams Gain From Tech Upgrades?

There’s obviously a cost involved in staying proactive about upgrading tech. Still, the benefits and costs saved from increased efficiencies will most likely outweigh the initial expenses of hardware and installation. Consider these benefits:

• Overall improved productivity. Upgraded AV can cut time and inefficiencies, saving meeting time for more productive tasks. People in meetings will feel the benefit of enhanced engagement because they can see, hear, and collaborate with each other more clearly. This has an inevitable impact; working relationships are more effective, and morale becomes higher.
• Increased actionability of meetings. The human brain has a limit, and now that we’re more immersed in technology than ever, we’re also more distracted. The average American looks at their phone 344 times per day, and people remember only about 10% of content two days after hearing or seeing it. Better presentations mean increased engagement and better recollection of information, which in turn makes meetings more actionable.

How Can Companies Successfully Upgrade Their AV and Hardware?

The aim is to better engage workers and make workflows smoother and more efficient. The process for identifying your AV needs and installing upgrades should bear those objectives in mind. Start here:

Stage a walk-through.

To make sure upgrades are practical and needed, walk through the rooms that need technology. What do you use this room for? Who uses it? The exec team? Sales? What kind of meetings take place here? Are investors or clients present? Create an inventory of these rooms. This will help you understand the type of tech you need and how “mission critical” each upgrade choice will be.

Identify which tech is best.

You can use an AV integrator to identify your needs and what the best, most reliable and well-priced equipment options are. Because an integrator is manufacturer-agnostic, its role is to understand your situation and make recommendations based on how you use rooms in your office. Pay attention to how experienced an AV integrator is. Supply chain issues are plaguing the world right now, and an experienced integrator will know which items can be sourced the quickest, so you can move forward with the critical job of running productive meetings.

Updating your organization’s AV setup has been important for a while, and it’s becoming impossible to overlook this task. As we gear up for even more hybrid work in the future, we all need to hear and see each other as best we can. Start upgrading today!

Bob Marsh is the chief revenue officer at Bluewater, a design-forward technology company that helps craft moments that connect and inspire. Specializing in retail technology, displays and fixtures, as well as AV integration and event tech services, Bluewater works with top brands like Walmart, Ford and Rocket Mortgage.

The post Why Now Is the Time to Update Your Company’s AV Tech appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Google, the Cybersecurity Certificate is designed and taught by the company’s cybersecurity experts and is designed to prepare learners for entry-level cybersecurity jobs in less than six months.

No cybersecurity experience is required, as the company’s goal is to fill the growing number of open cybersecurity jobs and help people make the transition to cybersecurity from other fields.

By some metrics, the U.S. alone is short about 700,000 cybersecurity professionals, which is alarming given that the frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks continues to increase.

Google’s Cybersecurity Certificate program

According to Google, the cybersecurity program builds on the company’s existing Career Certificates in other technology fields, such as data analytics, digital marketing and e-commerce, IT support, project management and user experience design.

The program will teach learners how to identity common risks, threats and vulnerabilities, as well as the techniques and tools used to mitigate them. Learners will get hands-on experience with industry-standard tools, such as Python, Linux and an array of security tools like security information and event management (SIEM) platforms.

Google’s Cybersecurity Certificate program will also help prepare job seekers for the CompTIA Security+ exam, which the company calls “the industry-leading certification for cybersecurity roles.” Learners will earn a dual credential upon completing both, the company says.

Partnerships with leading companies, universities

Google’s nonprofit grantees that help promote diversity in tech will also be offering the Cybersecurity Certificate and provide learners with additional support such as coaching, interview pre and job placement assistance.

In order to validate the effectiveness of its certification program, Google in 2018 launched the Google Career Certificates Employer Consortium that includes more than 150 employers, such as American Express, Mandiant, T-Mobile, Walmart, and Google itself. The company leaned on the consortium to beta test the content in the Cybersecurity Certificate program.

Education institutions such as Purdue University, the University of Texas System, Syracuse University and Northern Virginia Community College will offer the Cybersecurity Certificate to their students.

Employers that would like to hire the company’s Certificate graduates or use the Certificate for reskilling their employees can join Google’s employer consortium.

The post Google Launches New Cybersecurity Certificate Program appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The technology is exciting and has the power to unlock new capabilities and efficiencies that any IT leader would dream of, but it should be carefully evaluated and deployed just like any other enterprise tool, says Chirag Dekate, vice president analyst at Gartner.

According to Dekate, IT leaders should avoid the headlines about generative AI because the constant barrage of news, new products and integrations can be overwhelming. It can be hard to distinguish between different products and services, especially if organizations lack internal AI expertise.

Rather than diving headfirst into generative AI, IT leaders should evaluate the risk in engaging with these emerging AI models, evaluate the data and ethics policies of different vendors and decide whether they should wait for more advanced and accurate models to come out.

According to Dekate, there are three key considerations that IT leaders should evaluate when deploying generative AI tools in their organization.

Data security

Above anything else, the consumer adoption of generative AI shouldn’t be viewed as being in the same ballpark as business adoption, as some consumer-facing tools are trained on data inputs, meaning any proprietary information or sensitive data could be accessible by a competitor.

IT leaders should disallow widespread use of consumer-facing generative AI in enterprise applications, Dekate says.

“Any query you ask or any prompt you make essentially gets subsumed into the data model that is operating behind the scenes,” Dekate says. “With the enterprise, you cannot essentially compromise your corporate IP or customer data by integrating consumer-facing APIs into your product suite.”

IT leaders should take a hard look at the data policies of generative AI providers to ensure that their proprietary data is completely isolated from the data model,

“The first question they should ask is, ‘How is my data protected?’”

Listen to the interview with Chirag Dekate in this podcast episode!

Innovation risk

Dekate’s comments to TechDecisions came just days before thousands of AI and tech leaders called on the tech industry to pause AI investments and focus on making current models safer and more trustworthy.

According to Dekate, the rapid pace of innovation in AI could have security and privacy implications.

“The biggest risk I see in the rapid pace of innovation is potential slippage in how we secure some of the underlying data ecosystems, or inadvertently create a mechanization of noise,” Dekate says.

IT leaders need to put guardrails in place so they aren’t exposed to some of those risks.

However, generative AI companies are largely being transparent in how they communicate those risks and how models are trained. For example, OpenAI says GPT-4 was trained last year and the team spent the year vetting and testing the model. While the company says GPT-4 is capable of more than GPT-3, it is still not immune to hallucinations.

That kind of transparency should give organizations a blueprint to help them decide where the technology can help them, Dekate says.

Ethics and human control

Any application of generative AI in the business world should also adhere to ethics and responsibility frameworks that keep the control with human operators. Dekate uses the example of leveraging generative AI to create a marketing campaign by converting simple text into a blog post, but that content may include errors since generative AI tools are currently not entirely trustworthy.

Any enterprise application of generative AI should include guardrails that ensure human supervision is involved and that the output of these models is at least quality checked and approved, Dekate says.

“Without the necessary ethical guardrails and without the necessary responsibility guardrails, you run the risk of mechanizing noise and potentially showing up in the headlines for all the wrong reasons,” Dekate says.

The post Three Considerations Before Deploying Generative AI Tools appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Stempley, we now live in a software-defined world, which is making cybersecurity issues that have been around for decades more prevalent than ever before. She covers the paradoxes in a recent blog, and dives more in-depth into them in the interview.

Stempfley’s paradoxes include:

• Security vs. innovation
• The software defined-everything future is here vs. Software’s inherent vulnerability
• Boundaries vs. “perimeterless” security
• Security compliance vs. risk management
• Responsibility for one vs. culpability of all

Listen to the podcast in the player below or on your favorite podcasting platform!

The post My TechDecisions Podcast Episode 189: Navigating Cybersecurity, Innovation Paradoxes appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to a recent report from cybersecurity firm Acronis, phishing and malicious emails have increased by 60% in the third quarter of 2022, and social engineering attacks also jumped, accounting for 3% of all attacks. Continuing the theme of attacks on credentials and identities, Acronis says leaked for stolen credentials were the cause of almost half of all reported breaches in the first half of 2022.

Other research from USB security key manufacture Yubico finds that nearly 60% of users still rely on usernames and passwords as their primary method to authenticate into their corporate accounts. In addition, 54% of employees admit to writing down or sharing a password, and over 22% of those surveyed still think username and password is the most secure method of authentication

With credential theft still a reliable attack vector, IT providers are continuing to release passwordless solutions that help protect user identities and reduce the success of phishing and credential theft attacks.

Taylor talks about that trend and how IT managers should proceed with passwordless deployments and technologies, such as FIDO2.

Listen to the interview in the player below or your favorite podcasting tool!

The post My TechDecisions Podcast Episode 185: Preparing for the Passwordless Future appeared first on My TechDecisions.

In a new report from GreyNoise Intelligence, the company says the full scope of attacks involving the vulnerability will never be known.

There were many high-profile attacks against government, financial institutions, and other organizations, and Log4Shell has found its way into toolkits by a variety of hacking groups. In fact, the company has published blogs about a few instances, such as when hackers began using the exploit to target the Belgian Defense Ministry in late 2021, ransomware actors leveraging the bug and a North Korean group using it to hack U.S. energy companies.

While the brunt of Log4Shell activity came in December 2021 and January 2022, GreyNoise warns that organizations should expect to see “persistent internet-facing exploit attempts” as Log4j attack payloads become part of the new background noise of the internet. The exploit code has been baked into numerous hacking kits of threat actors at every level.

Watch the interview below or listen in the embedded player below.

The post My TechDecisions Podcast Episode 184: Log4J’s Persistence appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Google Cloud, the company’s Public Sector department directly assists Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA)–the Navy’s largest systems command–by providing support to the U.S. Naval Ship Repair Facility and Japan Regional Maintenance Center  (SRF-JRMC) in Yokosuka and Sasebo, Japan. Armed with the threat protection and zero trust capabilities in Google Workspace, NAVSEA uses Google’s suite of productivity tools to communicate between the SRF-JRMC and Navy stakeholders around the world.

The Tech Decision

First, the SRF-JRMC facility had to solve two unique challenges: ineffective collaboration and communication, and a language barrier.

Before choosing Google Workspace, Navy officers in Japan would need to be on-base to communicate over a secure connection, and calls were typically held late at night due to the time difference. When the COVID-19 pandemic came along, communication became even more challenging due to mobility restrictions.

The SRF-JRMC shipyard has more than 3,000 Japanese contract employees providing critical support, which presented a language barrier when communicating critical issues.

Secure, efficient and effective collaboration

Working with Google Public Sector, the Navy chose Google Workspace for the SRF-JRMC, bringing Google Voice for secure VoIP calling that allows personnel to join calls and sessions from on site or their home. And they can now reliably and securely communicate across continents.

In addition, Google Workspace includes solutions like real-time translated captions in the company’s videoconferencing tool Google Meet, which allows English to Japanese translations to help break down the language barrier.

The Google Meet platform has also proven cost effective, as it has saved the U.S. Navy “thousands of dollars a month” in phone bills by providing country-specific dial-in numbers for interviews, according to Google Cloud.

Other Google Workspace tools include Google Drive and Docs, and those help NAVSEA simplify human resource workflows by streamlining onboarding for local Japanese employees in the shipyard, according to Google Cloud. With a shared Google Drive, NAVSEA can eliminate the need to send multiple files back and forth among the team, which also helps minimize the need for on-premises storage.

Google Docs also enable Navy employees to communicate and collaborate with each other and potential candidates securely across any device, which helps SRF_JRMC CIO Peter Guo and his team ensure operational readiness and continuity of operations.

“Cloud collaboration capabilities provide us seamless and secure connectivity across continents and break down language barriers with our colleagues across the globe,” Guo says. “We’ve improved our ability to operate anytime, and anywhere and have increased our ability to securely communicate and coordinate especially during network outages and natural disasters.”

COVID-19 pandemic dashboard

Armed with Google Workspace, the SRF-JRMC created a COVID-19 Pandemic Dashboard with a Google-based site that consolidated Japanese and international open-source data on COVID-19 outbreaks and provided updated guidance, according to Google Cloud.

The dashboard, built in less than two hours using Google’s Looker Studio, leveraged an automated data collection process to track local hospitalization numbers. This allowed the NAVSEA team to access this information in real-time and shorten a process that previously took hours, according to Google Cloud.

According to Guo, the dashboard helped reduce redundant weekly meetings on COVID-19 updates and eliminated the 10 hours it took to manually gather data and present it via slide decks. This helped leadership make real-time, data-drive decisions and put necessary risk mitigation in place, he adds.

“It empowered supervisors across the shipyard to reference this website at any time and put additional health measures in place to minimize the transmission of COVID-19,” Guo says. “Every minute counts at our two shipyards in Japan, so this made a tremendous impact on our operational efficiency and ensured the safety of our sailors.”

The post Google Workspace Makes U.S. Navy Shipyard Collaboration More Efficient During COVID-19 appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The interview with Kennedy comes after the Rockleigh, N.J.-based control and automation systems manufacturer’s survey of more than 830 mid-level employees and 502 IT decision makers found that 41% say that half or fewer of their workspaces are equipped for full hybrid engagement. Crestron’s research also found that meetings must always be anticipated to be hybrid, as 84% of employees expect at least one remote participant to join their virtual meetings.

According to Kennedy, organizations that are embracing hybrid work but have not yet optimized their meeting spaces and conferencing technologies for hybrid work should think about doing so for 2023.

Listen to the podcast in the player below!

The post My TechDecisions Podcast Episode 180: Tackling Hybrid Meetings appeared first on My TechDecisions.