Teams, Zoom, VPN — and still no working remote setup

Because you are routing an entire company through a tunnel to reach a file server that was built for an office network. The result is an office network that is now slow for everyone, including the people sitting in the office. Making the tunnel fatter buys you months, not a fix. The application itself should be reachable and secured on its own, rather than hidden behind a VPN.

Because buying tools is not building an infrastructure. Remote work exposes weak processes; it does not create them. If an approval was already unclear when everyone sat in one building, a video call will not clarify it — it will just make the confusion synchronous. Write the process down first, decide who decides what, then choose the tool that carries it. In that order.

Yes, and you notice it late. A decision made in a direct message cannot be found three months later, and the colleague who left took the context with them. Chat replaced the paper, but it never replaced the process. A chat tool without a system of record is an organisational memory leak: fast today, expensive the first time someone asks who approved this and why.

Yes — it matters more at your size, not less. Every tool with its own login turns offboarding into a treasure hunt and makes 2FA optional in practice, because nobody can enforce what nobody can see. Single sign-on is not a luxury for corporations; it is the thing that makes security actually enforceable in a small company where no one has time to audit twelve separate user lists.