How Has Remote Work Changed After 1 Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

On this one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic declaration from the World Health Organization (WHO), let’s check back in on the remote work stats for the past year. 

In March 2020, we reported a surge in remote work as companies quickly transitioned to remote work to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Prior to the pandemic, less than 30% of all users on the Netskope Security Cloud platform worked remotely each day. Since then, 70% of all users are remote. Today, vaccines are being administered worldwide and some restrictions are being lifted. But the remote work numbers remain unchanged since the beginning of the pandemic. We don’t expect remote work numbers to fall until the summer, and even then we may never see remote work percentages among knowledge workers as low as 30% ever again.

We approximate the percentage of remote workers as “user dispersion,” the ratio of the number of distinct globally routable IP addresses from which users are working to the total number of users. If all users are on the same network, this ratio approaches 0%. If all users work remotely from different locations, this ratio approaches 100%.

The analysis presented in this blog post is based on anonymized usage data collected by the Netskope Security Cloud platform relating to a subset of Netskope customers with prior authorization.