Your IT Team Is Centralised. Your Business Isn't.

For many businesses, the days of having everyone — and everything — operating from one corporate office are long gone. 

Your IT team might still be based primarily at head office. But the environment they're responsible for could stretch across warehouses, depots, branches, project sites, customer locations and employees working in the field.

Those employees still need access to the same systems and information as everyone else. They still expect their devices to work. They still need support when something goes wrong.

And they still need to be protected from cyber threats — regardless of whether they're sitting ten metres from the IT team or working hundreds of kilometres away. For IT leaders, that creates an interesting challenge: How do you deliver secure, reliable and consistent technology when your business is anything but centralised?

1. The corporate network is no longer your security boundary

It was once relatively straightforward to think about IT security in terms of inside and outside. Employees worked in an office. Devices connected to the corporate network. Security controls protected the perimeter around them.

Today, the boundaries aren't nearly as clear. An employee could start the day at a regional depot, access Microsoft 365 from a project site in the afternoon and connect from home that evening.

Another might spend most of their week moving between customer locations. Meanwhile, applications and information that once lived inside the corporate network are increasingly delivered from the cloud.

In that environment, simply being "inside the network" is no longer a particularly useful measure of trust. Identity increasingly becomes the new perimeter. IT teams need confidence that the person requesting access is who they claim to be, that their device meets appropriate security requirements and that they're only accessing the information and systems they genuinely need.

Technologies such as multi-factor authentication, conditional access and modern identity management can help organisations make those decisions consistently — wherever an employee happens to be working. The objective isn't to make remote access difficult. It's to make secure access normal.

2. Every device becomes part of your IT environment

A distributed workforce also means a distributed collection of endpoints. Laptops move between offices, homes, project sites and public networks. Mobile devices travel everywhere employees do. Some devices may spend weeks or months without ever connecting directly to a traditional corporate network.

From an employee's perspective, none of that should matter. From IT's perspective, it matters enormously.

Can you see the devices accessing organisational information? Are they appropriately configured? Are operating systems and applications being patched? Are security tools operating correctly? Could you remotely secure or remove organisational information from a lost or stolen device? And if a device begins behaving suspiciously, will anybody know?

Modern endpoint management and security tools allow IT teams to apply policies, monitor devices and respond remotely without needing the laptop physically sitting on an IT desk. That's particularly important when the distance between the employee and the IT team isn't another floor. It could be another state.

3. Connectivity becomes an operational issue

When an employee at head office loses internet access, it's frustrating. When an operational site loses connectivity, the consequences can be much greater.

A warehouse might rely on cloud-based systems to process orders. A depot may need connectivity to coordinate people and equipment. A project team might depend on access to plans, documents and business applications. A field employee may need information to complete work for a customer.

Suddenly, the network isn't simply something that allows employees to browse the internet. It's part of the operation itself.

That changes the conversation around connectivity. Is there sufficient redundancy at critical locations? What happens if the primary connection fails? Are business-critical applications being prioritised appropriately? Can IT see when performance is deteriorating before employees begin calling? And can a new or temporary location be connected securely without creating an entirely bespoke IT environment?

For distributed organisations, network resilience and business resilience are increasingly difficult to separate.

4. Supporting people remotely isn't the same as supporting remote workers

When people hear "remote work", they often picture an employee working from home. But distributed businesses face a much broader support challenge.

An employee could be at a warehouse, depot, construction site, regional branch, customer premises or somewhere in the field when their technology stops working. They can't necessarily walk over to the IT team. And the IT team can't necessarily walk over to them. Yet the employee still expects the problem to be resolved.

That makes visibility, remote management and standardisation incredibly important. The more consistent the technology environment is across locations and devices, the easier it becomes for a central IT team to support.

Conversely, if every site has evolved independently — different network equipment, different configurations, different devices and different processes — supporting the organisation can become increasingly complicated as it grows.

The goal should be for employees to receive a consistent technology experience regardless of location. They shouldn't need to know which network they're connected to or which office their support technician works from. They just need technology that works.

5. You can't protect what you can't see

Perhaps the common thread running through all of these challenges is visibility. When everything is inside one office, understanding the environment can be relatively straightforward. When people, devices, applications and networks are spread across dozens of locations, it's much easier for blind spots to emerge.

IT teams need to be able to answer questions such as:

• Who is accessing organisational systems?
• What devices are they using?
• Are those devices secure and compliant?
• Are critical locations connected and operating normally?
• Are endpoints appropriately patched and protected?
• Is unusual activity being detected?
• Can IT respond remotely when something goes wrong?

Without that visibility, IT can become reactive — waiting for an employee to report a problem or for an outage or security incident to make itself obvious. With the right visibility, IT teams can identify issues earlier, manage the environment more consistently and spend less time troubleshooting technology one location at a time.

Your IT function can be centralised without your technology experience feeling centralised

There's nothing inherently wrong with having a centralised IT team. In fact, centralisation can provide consistency, clearer governance and access to specialist expertise. The problem arises when the technology environment assumes the rest of the organisation is centralised too.

Your employees shouldn't receive a better technology experience simply because they happen to work near head office. And your security shouldn't become weaker simply because someone is working from a project site, warehouse or regional location.

The aim is to create an IT environment where location matters less. Where identity and security controls follow the employee. Where devices can be managed remotely. Where critical locations have resilient connectivity. Where IT has visibility across the environment. And where an employee can get the support they need regardless of where they're working.

Because ultimately, your customers don't care where your IT team is based. Neither should your employees. Technology should simply work wherever your business does.

Is your IT environment keeping pace with your business?

As organisations grow across new locations, sites and ways of working, technology environments can become increasingly complex.

Subnet helps Australian businesses design, secure and support IT environments that work across offices, sites and distributed teams.

Talk to Subnet about your IT environment →