Washington Works Blog

Picture pouring a bucket of water down a standard kitchen funnel. If you pour slowly, a drop at a time, the water flows smoothly through the narrow spout, but if you tip the bucket all at once, the water backs up, pools at the top, and eventually spills over the edges. For years, the Virtual Private Network (VPN) served as the corporate equivalent of that narrow funnel spout. It was designed for an era when data volume was small and entirely centralized—meaning all of a company's valuable digital assets lived inside a single, physical office server room.

A remote worker turned on their VPN, established a single encrypted tunnel back to the office firewall, and gained broad access to the local network.

If you’re balancing office servers and cloud tools, it’s time to shift your focus. Managing IT isn't just about the physical hardware anymore; it’s about making sure your team can actually do their jobs. The goal is to maximize the value of the technology you’ve already bought while ensuring the system stays fast and reliable from anywhere. When you mix private servers with public cloud services, you’re building a bridge that needs to be easy for your employees to cross but impossible for hackers to break into.

Connecting to a public Wi-Fi network is, at best, a roll of the dice, and more often than not, foolhardy and actively dangerous. Meant as a convenience, it is most convenient for someone trying to monitor your network traffic. These networks, maintained by a third party, are left wide open by design… making them in no way trustworthy, particularly for business purposes.

What defines your office in 2026? If your answer is still tied to a street address, your business may be carrying unnecessary risk. In an era where the hyper-hybrid model prevails, the office is no longer a destination—it is a secure, high-performing network node.

Sometimes it feels like a lot to ask for small businesses to invest in new technology, even if that technology is beneficial to their mission. There’s a better way to access the right hardware for the job, though, and it stems from the cloud. By moving some of your hardware to the cloud, you can save money and frustrations during implementation and operation, all while enjoying greater security.

The shift to remote work has transformed business, yet the virtual meeting remains a point of friction. A poorly executed remote meeting isn't just a time-waster; it drains productivity and damages company culture.

With the right strategy and tools, your remote meetings can be even more effective and engaging than in-person ones.

It’s the summer solstice tonight, the official start of the summer season. While most of us want to focus on honing our grilling skills and soaking up as much sun as possible, we can’t afford to let our cybersecurity awareness falter as a result.

Let’s review how you can stay secure while enjoying the season.

With remote workers, you have a lot more questions to consider on a daily basis, especially in the realms of productivity and security. If you’re not careful, you could put your business at risk. Here’s how you can face these challenges head-on and ensure your organization doesn’t suffer any negative side effects of remote work.

Business is filled with situations that can easily be turned into problems if they are not met with a proper solution. In some cases, it’s as simple as changing a course of action, but some problems are deep-rooted and need to be addressed aggressively. Technology can often be a business’ saving grace in such instances.

Let’s review some really bad scenarios that could be catastrophic, unless the right IT is in place.

Working remotely has given employees flexibility and work-life balance, but it also presents businesses with unique challenges—for example, security. When your network is spread out over several different locations, like with the at-home office, the threat surface increases. Today, we want to cover three ways you can take the bite out of remote work security and make it more effective for all involved.

Many businesses today operate across the globe, thanks to fast Internet speeds that support remote work. By hiring workers from different parts of the world, companies can create and deliver their products or services more efficiently. In this blog, we’ll look at the key changes businesses need to make when working with remote teams.

Having your team connected through mobile, especially with access to collaboration and communication tools, is the new normal in business. Many organizations take advantage of the ubiquity of smartphones and either provide mobile devices to their staff or utilize the built-in options on many of today’s newest mobile OSs that allow them to put an encrypted work profile on; effectively adding mobility to your business without a huge capital investment. Regardless of what option you choose, you need to have management software in place if you are going to trust your employees to have access to company information outside of the office. 

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, business owners considered remote work a forbidden fruit. If employees got a taste, they would only want more of it. Nowadays, remote work is a bit more commonplace, no doubt as a result of the pandemic forcing most knowledge workers into some sort of remote work arrangement. How have companies adjusted to this new reality? Let’s look at the numbers.

The work landscape has changed quite a bit in a short period of time. Nearly 13% of American workers work from home full-time, while over 27% more work remotely part-time. With nearly two-fifths of workers working from home at least part-time, understanding what technology is behind this new normal and how to meet your business needs is critical. 

With remote and hybrid work models becoming prominent parts of the business world, it’s time to start considering the challenges and benefits that such work can bring about for your own organization. Specifically, you want to examine how engagement is affected by these workplace models. How can you ensure employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention even while utilizing a remote or hybrid workplace model?

The workplace has undergone a dramatic shift over the past several years in favor of remote work, due in no small part to worldwide circumstances. In fact, many workers who would prefer to work in-office found themselves unable to, pushing the button on the topic of remote work even more. While there are some outspoken companies that want to see the return of in-office work, experts in the industry seem to be of the opposite opinion.

One of the biggest arguments for remote work is that it poses environmental benefits, but how much truth is there to this statement? Today, we want to dive into the details and see if there is actually a solid benefit to working remotely—for the environment, at least. The answer might surprise you.

Remote work has seen unprecedented adoption in the past few years. While we’re all for the benefits that this trend brings, it is critical that any business that embraces remote or hybrid work does so securely.

Let’s discuss a few measures that your business can and should implement to achieve this security.

Hot desking—the workplace organization method wherein there are no assigned workstations—has an assortment of pros and cons to it, but many companies are finding the more fiscal benefits to be worth the trade-offs. Let’s explore some of the pros and cons of hot desking, and go over a few tips and strategies that will help if you choose to implement it. 

Unfortunately, cybersecurity is a lot easier to reinforce in the office than it is when your team members are working remotely—and even then, it can be a serious challenge to maintain. However, let’s focus on the remote worker’s situation for a few moments and review a few best practices that can help a remote worker stay secure.