Essential Digital Tools to Create the Perfect Remote Office Setup

Cloud

The move to a mobile workforce has opened a realm of possibilities, but remote work is not without its hurdles. While working remotely promises a healthy work-life balance and more flexibility, the biggest challenge is often recreating a seamless office environment for remote employees outside the office.

The ultimate goal is a virtual office that can be used from any location, with the same capabilities as a physical workspace. Fortunately, the right combination of remote work tools can boost your productivity, no matter where you are. In this guide, we’ll examine seven essential categories of tools for a productive remote office and highlight some of the best options within each.

Communication and collaboration tools

Communication and real-time collaboration form the foundation of remote work. Remote teams rely on video conferencing and efficient communication platforms to collaborate and keep in touch. The ability to effortlessly communicate with team members immediately or through asynchronous communication platforms is essential for a company taking advantage of the global talent pool.

The popularity of communication tools such as Microsoft Teams and Slack may influence users to adopt these collaboration tools. While these solutions may fill some needs, they are proprietary tools, and customization options can be limited. Here are some of the best remote work tools that support real-time collaboration, and can be customized to align with the specific usage scenarios of your remote team (and can be found and easily installed from the Kamatera Marketplace).

Mattermost: This open-source alternative makes remote collaboration easy with its familiar, chat-based interface. It can be self-hosted on a VPS, giving your organization complete control over its data. Mattermost supports one-on-one messaging, group chats, and file sharing, and its extensive customization options allow you to integrate it seamlessly with your existing tools and workflows. This is a powerful, secure option for companies that want to maintain full ownership of their communication infrastructure.

Rocket Chat: This is another powerful, open-source communication platform that can be self-hosted on your own server for maximum security and data privacy. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools, including real-time chat, video conferencing, and file sharing. Rocket.Chat’s flexibility is one of its biggest strengths—it can be customized with a wide range of integrations and bots, making it adaptable to any team, from software development to customer support.

Jitsi: Jitsi provides excellent video conferencing software. While many communication platforms offer video calls as an add-on, Jitsi focuses on delivering high-quality, encrypted video meetings without the need for an account. By self-hosting Jitsi on a VPS, companies can ensure that all video and audio communication remains private and under their direct control, free from the data privacy concerns of proprietary services. It’s a perfect solution for teams that require a simple, secure, and reliable platform for remote meetings and collaboration.

Remote desktop and IT support

Mobile workers often require remote desktop access to run applications, provide customer support, or connect to company resources for various reasons. They must use a secure platform to protect sensitive information from being compromised by threat actors. The ability to seamlessly launch secure virtual desktops is essential for maintaining the viability and productivity of remote teams.

Many options are available for establishing remote desktops that give employees the same level of functionality as if they were sitting in front of an office computer at company headquarters. Cloud desktop hosting enables remote workers to launch virtual desktops in a secure environment, providing access to a comprehensive suite of computing resources. Users can leverage an intuitive interface to quickly provision and configure cloud servers, addressing changing remote desktop requirements.

Project and task management tools

Project management tools are essential to ensure all members of a remote team are on the same page. Many organizations find project management challenging when supporting a mobile workforce. Teams need the ability to plan projects and track progress efficiently to meet deadlines and customer expectations or risk losing business to more effective competitors.

Project management is highly dependent on an organization’s policies and priorities. While all viable solutions should include key features like time tracking and support remote collaboration, the addition of customization options in the following open-source tools might be just what your business needs.

• Redmine: Redmine is an excellent open-source option for a robust and flexible project management solution. It’s a comprehensive tool that helps manage projects, track tasks, and collaborate with your team. Redmine supports multiple projects, offers fine-grained access control, and includes features like Gantt charts and calendars to visualize project progress. Because it’s self-hosted, you can customize it to fit your team’s specific needs, integrate it with other tools, and maintain full control over your project data.
• OpenProject: Designed to be a powerful and scalable project management system, OpenProject is an ideal solution for teams that need a feature-rich, open-source alternative to commercial software. It offers a complete suite of project management tools, including agile and Scrum support, timeline management, bug tracking, and budget control. OpenProject is built for collaboration, with a clean interface that allows team members to organize tasks efficiently. Like Redmine, its open-source nature gives you the freedom to host it on your own server and tailor it to your organization’s unique requirements.

Cloud storage and file sharing

Companies embracing remote work need robust file-sharing and cloud storage solutions to protect security for sensitive data. Centralizing files in an accessible centralized location allows distributed teams to work efficiently, with team members able to quickly retrieve documents while maintaining confidence in their data’s security.

While popular platforms like Google Drive and OneDrive offer solid functionality, they require users to maintain accounts with external providers. Organizations seeking greater control over their data may prefer independent cloud storage solutions that don’t rely on third-party account management.

• Kamatera’s cloud block storage solution is an advanced data storage system featuring a centralized architecture with no single points of failure. The solution emulates a virtual private hard drive for cloud servers and is adaptable to the needs of small and large businesses. Data is fragmented into individually tagged blocks with unique identifiers before being stored. This methodology promotes ultra-low latency and optimal performance for high-throughput workloads. Teams can modify individual data blocks without rewriting the complete file.
• Nextcloud is a free, open-source suite of software supporting the creation and use of file hosting services. Users have complete control over their data and can add functionality to the file server with custom applications. Companies can utilize Nextcloud for many uses, including enterprise file sharing, file synchronization, data backup and recovery, and integration with third-party apps.

Security tools

Remote workers need robust security measures to protect both the sensitive data on their devices and the broader corporate IT infrastructure. When laptops, mobile devices, and other endpoints lack proper protection, they become entry points for ransomware and malware that can disrupt essential business applications and databases. Cybercriminals actively target poorly secured endpoints to steal user credentials and gain unauthorized access to company systems and data.

Securing a virtual workspace requires multiple work tools and a multifaceted approach that combines several technical solutions.

• VPN (Virtual Private Network): Remote teams can control online security and privacy with a secure VPN solution, such as OpenVPN. Companies can establish a secure network to enable remote employees to access critical applications from anywhere.
• Firewalls: A cloud firewall prevents unauthorized access to your network and is essential when protecting remote endpoints. Firewall solutions like FortiGate VM and OPNSense analyze data packets based on their source, destination, and content according to your rules. The software blocks or reroutes suspicious traffic to keep it out of your IT environment.
• Password management tools: Many successful cyberattacks begin with a threat actor compromising a user’s credentials and gaining access to the IT environment. A password manager like PassBolt may help employees maintain multiple complex passwords to thwart potential attackers.

Productivity tools

Remote teams can struggle to maintain a high level of productivity and a positive work-life balance. It can be challenging to keep up with monotonous procedures that are essential to keeping the business running efficiently. Remote work can be streamlined by the ability to automate routine tasks, freeing up the individual for more value-added activities.

Teams must choose an automation solution that aligns with their workflow and specific requirements. For example, a customer support team will need different functionality and features than application developers. The following are several automation solutions tailored toward the DevOps community.

• Jenkins automates the non-human portion of the software development process by facilitating the technical aspects of continuous delivery. The tool also enables users to schedule jobs and implement automated and customized reporting procedures.
• Ansible is an automation tool focused on automating IT infrastructure, application deployment, and system administration tasks. Users without extensive programming skills can define and execute automation playbooks to streamline routine activities.
• n8n is a powerful, open-source workflow automation tool that provides users with a visual method for connecting apps and services. The software helps remote teams automate workflows with no server maintenance requirements or scaling limitations.

Documentation and note-taking

Remote workers face a unique challenge: they are responsible for ensuring they have adequate and accessible documentation to perform their roles efficiently. Working in a more isolated environment can make a lack of information particularly difficult. Integrating knowledge management tools, such as those listed below, into a remote office suite can help teams overcome these hurdles.

• DokuWiki is an excellent tool for remote work. It allows teams to create a centralized knowledge base that everyone can contribute to and edit. It’s simple to set up and use, and because it’s file-based, it doesn’t require a database. While it doesn’t have native project management tools, it can be used to track progress on tasks and projects by creating structured pages for different workflows and using a logical tagging system to keep things organized.
• Moodle is best known as a learning management system, but also serves as a powerful knowledge management tool that can boost productivity for remote teams. Its robust platform allows companies to centralize and organize all of their company knowledge, from training materials and onboarding guides to product documentation and team-specific resources. With features like forums, wikis, and file repositories, remote workers can easily access and share information. Moodle’s secure framework and self-hosting options also enable secure file sharing, ensuring that sensitive company data remains protected and accessible only to authorized team members.

Conclusion

Real-time collaboration tools are essential for the mobile workforce. As we’ve seen, having the right digital toolkit of the top remote work tools—from video communication platforms like Jitsi and Rocket.Chat to knowledge bases like Moodle and DokuWiki—can be the key to allow remote teams to thrive and perform at the same level as their on-site counterparts.