Travel Tips for the Tech-Savvy Professional

For many professionals, finding themselves on the road (or on an airplane) has quickly become a way of life. With more and more jobs requiring extensive travel regardless of industry, staying productive while away from the office has become of paramount importance. Luckily, technology has stepped up to answer this particular call, and things like the cloud have made it easier than ever to get all of the work you need to get done regardless of location - even if you're halfway around the world away from your office. As with most things, however, this does require you to keep a few key things in mind.

There's File Sharing, and Then There's Secure File Sharing

In the last few years, file-sharing solutions have become a lifesaver for anyone who needs to remain as productive as possible even if they can't physically make it to the office to do so. More and more traveling professionals are turning to cloud-based providers to do everything from collaborating on documents to sending files to clients for approval and more, all while on the go. The most important thing to consider in this regard, however, is security. This is particularly true because as a traveling professional, you'll likely be spending a great deal of time on public Wi-Fi networks.

While a cloud-based file-sharing provider itself may be secure, your connection is most certainly not. All it would take is someone connected to the same public network that you are with a little knowledge to pluck every kilobyte of data you're sending and receiving out of the air, exposing you and your enterprise to harm. If you're serious about file sharing, invest in an FTP (file transfer protocol) solution for your business.

You still get all of the file-sharing benefits you've grown accustomed to, but you get the added benefit of both at-rest and in-transit encryption. Even if someone were to intercept an important, confidential file you're working on or transmitting, the data inside would be impossible to access without the encryption keys that only the sender or the recipient have.

Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, is something that tech-savvy traveling professionals should look into if they're serious about doing as much work as possible on the go. IaaS takes the same concept as file sharing only it extends these benefits to EVERY last part of your digital life - from the software that you use to the hardware you use it on and more. All of your mission-critical services are delivered in an on-demand capacity over the internet, meaning that the program you use to get work done in the office is the same one you use to get work done while on vacation.

Because everything is hosted online, you don't ever have to worry about creating a file in one version of a program that turns out to be incompatible with the one you use when you get back home. This also removes the reliance on a single operating system from the equation, turning EVERY computer or mobile device into essentially a carbon copy of your work computer at any given moment.

These are just a few of the tips that the tech-savvy traveling professional can use to remain as productive and as proactive as possible while on the go. Technology is a great thing, but it is NOT a magic bullet - you still have to be careful so that you don't find yourself on the receiving end of a data breach due to lax security protocols (or worse - user error). As long as you understand that "productivity" and "security" are two terms that will always be closely related, you'll find that geography is no longer your biggest inhibitor of productivity any longer.