The Modern Workplace

Blog September 2022

What the Modern Workplace actually is

Strip away the branding and the Modern Workplace is a specific technical proposition: identity in Entra ID rather than trust in a network perimeter; devices managed by Intune from the cloud rather than imaged and domain-bound; applications delivered and updated automatically; and data living in services designed for sharing, governed by policy, not by where a file happens to sit.

The organising principle is that identity replaces location. Whether a person is in the office, at home or on a train, they get the same secure access to the same tools, because trust is evaluated per user, per device and per session, not granted wholesale to anything inside the firewall.

Why it matters now

We've spent years guiding customers along modern workplace journeys, and the pandemic compressed a decade of that change into two years. Remote and hybrid work stopped being a policy question and became infrastructure fact. Meanwhile the security ground shifted the same way: when your people, devices and data are everywhere, a perimeter defends a building your work no longer lives in.

A network perimeter defends a building your work no longer lives in.

There's a talent dimension too. People now evaluate employers partly on the working experience, and a laptop that arrives pre-configured, signs in cleanly and just works is part of that experience. So is its opposite.

How we approach the transition

The mistake we see most often is treating the Modern Workplace as a procurement exercise: buy the licences, switch it on, hope. The estates that transition well do it in a disciplined order: understand what you have, rationalise what you carry, harden as you build, and migrate in governed stages with a pilot in front of every wave.

That's the sequence our DooR methodology enforces: outcomes defined first, an evidence-based As-Is analysis, a target state set by senior specialists, then staged delivery with training and handover built in. The destination is a platform your own team runs confidently, not a dependency on ours.

The Modern Workplace is no longer the ambitious option. It's the baseline your next hire, your next audit and your next security incident will all assume. The only real question is whether you get there deliberately or under pressure.