Remote Workers… BYOPT!
If you haven’t noticed by now, the employee productivity landscape is rapidly changing. Hopefully your company files are safely in the cloud and you’ve already adopted SaaS tools that provide the flexibility needed for today’s fluid work environment. The balance between the need to enable remote work vs. being able to tightly control everything has begun to shift. That’s not to say that business owners don’t care about data security, but communication, collaboration, and remote productivity play more of an important role in the priority mix now.
For example, companies can be satisfied with a remote working solution consisting of a plethora of independent SaaS tools as long as they can still maintain basic control over corporate resources.
Bring Your Own Productivity Tool (BYOPT)
In this kind of world, there is an opportunity for remote workers to use a variety of their own tools and equipment. It’s not just hardware sitting in your home office. Software tools that provide an access and organizational layer on top of corporate data in SaaS services, cloud storage, or other infrastructure can have value without circumventing corporate control.
For example, if you have a corporate Google Drive account that you need to access but would also like to have desktop sync for your personal Google Drive, you could use a product like odrive to get universal sync for all of your cloud storage, including your multiple Google Drive accounts.
Disabling access at the Google Drive storage level is the same whether or not the remote worker is using a native Google Drive sync client or their own productivity tool like odrive.
Access, Organization, and Integration
If that’s the case, then shouldn’t the modern remote worker look for whatever gives him or her the best access, organizational, and integration capabilities so they can get the most done with the fewest pieces of software?
This is not a new idea. People have been using their own email clients for decades. Another natural evolution was the unified chat app (remember those old XMPP clients like Pidgin?). We may even see another kind of unified chat app come along for everything from Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Facebook Messenger / WhatsApp, iMessage, Text messaging, and more. What is different and new, though, is that unified access tools no longer take decades to overcome corporate IT acceptance.
For cloud storage, the best way to access it would be unified… all in one place and under one login. Also, you’d want a way to see all available files without having to download them all — odrive, for example, has Infinite Sync which puts down placeholder files, so you don’t have to download a file until you need it. Files that are not relevant to your current tasks can remain on remote storage without eating up any local disk space or network bandwidth.
You’d also want to be able to sync any and all storage (even services that don’t have their own sync) out there so you can cut down on the amount of software you need to keep running on your computer. You can even get a folder for all the files you’ve uploaded to Slack (or your pictures on Facebook).
Bring It
So go ahead, bring your own productivity tool. Use what works best for you for both work, personal stuff, and play. Corporate IT controls their data, but you control how to make working with it easier.
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