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What is Digital Employee Experience (DEX)?

How digital employee experience (DEX) enhances productivity and engagement.

In a workplace increasingly defined by remote and hybrid setups, a critical new area of focus is emerging: the digital employee experience (DEX). At its core, DEX refers to all the interactions employees have with the technology and digital systems their employer supplies.

But DEX is about more than just software and tools—it’s about how effectively those systems support workplace productivity, foster employee engagement, and align with broader business goals.

Defining Digital Employee Experience.

DEX goes beyond the hardware and applications employees use daily. It’s a strategy grounded in understanding how employees interact with technology to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

A trusted IT provider can help you measure workplace productivity and turn sentiments into analytics by understanding your workforce’s digital workflows and recommending actionable steps to eliminate friction points. For business leaders, the business value of a well-executed DEX strategy is hard to ignore. Here’s why:

Attract and retain talent. In today’s fast-paced workplaces, employees expect seamless and supportive digital tools, whether they’re working in the office, hybrid, or remotely. Research from Gartner shows that workers who are satisfied with IT-provided applications, services, and devices are three times more likely to stay and grow in their roles compared to dissatisfied employees. In addition, staff members who experience proactive IT support—not just reactive fixes—are twice as likely to recommend their organization as a good place to work. This makes DEX a critical factor in reducing turnover and maintaining a competitive edge.
Boost productivity. Frustrating or inefficient tools are more than just an annoyance—they’re proven productivity killers. Understanding how employees use their applications and collecting their feedback can help businesses identify friction points and streamline workflows. Once those issues are addressed, staff members are empowered to deliver results instead of wrestling with subpar technology.
Enhance employee skills. A strong DEX strategy encourages employees to develop digital dexterity: the ability to quickly adapt to and adopt new technologies. By fostering this skill, businesses position their workforce to embrace innovation, respond effectively to change, and deliver on strategic goals.

The business case for DEX.

In today’s digital-first world, employees’ interactions with workplace technology often define their overall experience with the organization. For companies aiming to attract top talent, boost productivity, and remain competitive, a thoughtful DEX strategy isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential, especially if your employees work remotely or have hybrid schedules.

The shift to remote and hybrid work has fundamentally reshaped how employees interact with their organizations. For many, their only connection to the workplace is through digital systems. This new reality has transformed digital employee experience (DEX) from a vague concept into a cornerstone of successful business operations, ensuring that remote and hybrid teams remain productive, engaged, and secure.

Navigating the challenges of remote work.

Remote employees face a host of issues: unreliable internet connections, fickle file accessibility, poorly optimized collaboration tools, and a lack of access to IT support. For hybrid teams, these challenges are compounded by the need to transition seamlessly between in-office and remote environments.

A robust DEX strategy for remote and hybrid work involves proactive measures to minimize these challenges. These include:

Optimized collaboration apps. Your employees deserve intuitive, high-performing platforms for communication and teamwork. This includes tools that offer instant messaging, project management, and high-reliability video conferencing solutions. Some of the most common include Microsoft Teams, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Google Workspace, Slack, and Asana. But new tools emerge every year, and a trusted IT provider can help you vet, test, and implement the right ones.
Streamlined access. Single sign-on (SSO) systems provide enhanced cybersecurity protection, while cloud-based file sync and share ensures employees can access what they need from any location without friction.
Device management. Endpoint management and remote monitoring allow IT teams to keep devices secure and functional, even when they’re used outside the office or disconnected from in-office cybersecurity protections.

Ensuring security without sacrificing experience.

For remote and hybrid workers, security is often the defining element of their day-to-day digital work. With employees logging in from home networks, shared spaces, or even public Wi-Fi, protecting sensitive data requires extra vigilance. Yet overly restrictive security measures can hinder productivity and frustrate employees.

To balance security with usability, businesses should understand the following options:

Multi-factor authentication (MFA). By requiring additional authentication steps, MFA protects login protocols even if passwords are compromised. MFA should be used across every application that employees use in their workday.
Zero-trust architectures. This approach assumes every access attempt could be a potential risk, requiring users to regularly verify their identity and access privileges. In sensitive industries like healthcare and finance, this is evolving into a digital standard.
Virtual private networks (VPNs). Secure, reliable VPNs give remote workers protected portals to safely access company networks and business information.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR). Advanced EDR solutions provide IT support staff visibility into potential threats while maintaining employee device functionality.

By integrating these security measures into a comprehensive DEX strategy, businesses can protect sensitive data while maintaining a smooth and frustration-free employee experience.

Building engagement in a remote workforce.

One of the most overlooked benefits of DEX in remote and hybrid work is its ability to foster employee engagement and company-wide connection. When employees feel that their technology empowers rather than hinders them, their commitment and motivation levels also increase. Here’s how:

Proactive IT support. Remote workers often cite IT challenges as a primary source of frustration. Offering proactive support through 24/7 monitoring and automated troubleshooting ensures that problems are addressed before they disrupt workflows.
Open channels of communication. Regularly soliciting employee feedback through surveys or dedicated platforms allows businesses to identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments.
Training and education. Providing training sessions and resources for digital tools can help employees maximize their productivity and feel more confident in their roles.

The long-term value of DEX.

As remote and hybrid work become permanent fixtures in many industries, businesses that prioritize a strong DEX strategy stand to benefit. Supporting a distributed workforce with optimized technology, seamless access, and robust security doesn’t just address immediate challenges—it lays the groundwork for adaptability and growth in the future.

If you want to retain top talent, provide a positive and supportive work environment, increase productivity, and build a resilient and secure IT infrastructure, CMIT Solutions can help. We provide user-friendly tech tools that can help you navigate the complexities of today’s remote and hybrid workforce while stepping up to meet tomorrow’s challenges.

For businesses navigating the complexities of a remote and hybrid workforce, DEX isn’t just an operational necessity—it’s a strategic advantage. Contact CMIT Solutions today to learn more.

~01/10/2025

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Top 10 Cybersecurity Tips for Businesses

Cybersecurity is no longer an optional add-on for businesses—it’s necessary with the rise of digital transformation, including best practices for your business. Companies of all sizes are vulnerable to cyberattacks that can cripple operations, leak sensitive personal information, and damage reputations.

To protect your business from these threats, be proactive about cybersecurity. This guide covers the top 10 cybersecurity tips every business should use to build a solid defense against cyber threats.

Basic cybersecurity tips for businesses

Below, we’ll explore the steps and tips for employees to enhance their cybersecurity awareness, protect sensitive data, and maintain a secure digital environment.

Invest in your cybersecurity

Your cybersecurity budget should match your business size.

Budgeting for cybersecurity can prevent costly breaches, but this investment requires installing new security tools and hiring IT professionals.

Your business needs to invest in cybercrime prevention now and in the future. Protect your business from cyber risk now rather than later.

~01/10/2025

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Summary of Obacks Service Event in Central Data Center

Issue Summary

On Thursday, 6/1/2023 at approximately 1PM CST, our team was alerted to servers going offline at our central data center location. Our data center is designed with fully redundant hardware. In the event a piece of hardware fails or goes offline, under normal circumstances there would be no services disruption. However, in this instance, we discovered there was a complete loss of connectivity on all redundant hardware which resulted in the entire data center environment going offline.

Service Impact

There are multiple services hosted at this data center location. This includes hosted servers, our hosted Exchange email platform, oDrive, as well as some of our voice over IP servers. The outage affected all of the hosted servers that are running primarily from this data center, Exchange email, and oDrive. While our VoIP service is hosted out of the same physical data center, this service runs on a completely separate network and was mostly unaffected by the service outage. However, there were two instances of brief connectivity loss due to some necessary troubleshooting steps our team was performing to resolve the outage. This impact to VoIP was very minimal.

Full Issue Description

Our team was in the process of working on a 3rd party monitoring system that is tied in to our data center, to provide additional proactive monitoring from one of our hardware support vendors. The hardware vendor provided our team with a set of commands to add into a core switch network to assist in allowing this monitoring to become functional. We now believe there was a miscommunication with the hardware vendor on how our system was configured, and the configuration we were provided were not the correct configuration that should have been entered into the system. Upon entering the configuration, it caused all of our redundant networking hardware to reboot simultaneously, which of course should never occur.

The reboot of all core hardware simultaneously caused a catastrophic event, which disconnects all internet connectivity, as well as disconnects the virtual compute layer from the storage layer, which essentially freezes all servers running in the environment. Once the hardware fully rebooted, services generally will not automatically restore, and our team had to further troubleshoot. Our compute environment is connected to our storage systems through multiple 40GbE redundant links. It was discovered two of these transceiver modules failed simultaneously. While the links should have been redundant and allowed us to begin restoring service with only one link coming back online, with both links, we were unable to restore service. We immediately contacted our support vendor to dispatch replacement parts, which are on the quickest 4-hour replacement window. Upon arrival, these parts were replaced, and our back-end connectivity was restored.

With the compute and storage layers being disconnected for so long, virtual servers continued to "run" in memory, however without the ability to read/write to storage, these virtual servers were essentially in a frozen state. Our team then began to manually power down all virtual servers in the environment, and power them back on. This is a laborious process as there are hundreds of servers running, with each one having to be touched individually. Due to the nature of the failure, some servers have issues booting and have to have additional work performed on them to ensure they fully boot and come back online. Our team worked diligently on this process for hours until all servers were verified online by approximately 11PM CST. The issue was then handed off to our after-hours team, to work on manually going into each individual server, testing client applications, and verifying file and database integrities to ensure there were no further issues that would arise at the start of business on today, Friday 6/2/23.

Event Communication

We understand this was a critical event and had a large-scale impact to our client's business needs. Due to such an unprecedented and unexpected failure of the system, there were delays in notifying our clients of the full impact while our team was attempting to gain a full understanding of what occurred. This resulted in a delay in notifying clients from our status system, as well as being able to provide a better ETA on restoration of services.

Future Planning

With this level of outage not being an event that was fully planned for, we will be revising multiple procedures and making additional changes internally to prevent future occurrences such as this. Our change management policy consists of certain pre-approved changes, however in this instance although this was a pre-approved change and this configuration was received from a hardware support vendor, the configuration provided for this pre-approved change was incorrect. Going forward, we will be reducing our list of pre-approved changes to be much smaller and minimal. Our change management process workflow will require additional levels of review and approval before any of these changes are implemented. While much work can be performed on our data center environment while live, without any service interruptions, we will be requiring scheduled maintenance windows for additional changes as well. Lastly, we will be evaluating the spare hardware we keep on hand, and purchasing additional spare hardware, so even in the event of multiple simultaneous hardware failures, we can still provide immediate replacements without the need to wait on a part to be dispatched.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to our team and we will be more than happy to discuss this matter further with you. We strive to keep our systems online at all times, and fully understand any outage, small or large, can affect your business. We will continue to work to provide the best level of service you have come to expect from ScoNet.

Thank you,

Kyle Maulden
Chief Technical Officer

~06/02/2023