As the trend of remote employment continues to build momentum, businesses must grapple with the security threats and technological inefficiencies of employees working from remote locations across different devices and systems.

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HR leaders are at the center of this and must work with IT to keep employees under one roof from a technological standpoint, leveraging unified communications to manage and equip remote employees in this changing landscape.

Following are three tips businesses should consider as they prepare for an increasingly remote workforce.

Don't lose face-to-face interactions

After launching remote working arrangements, many learn the importance of retaining face-to-face interactions in order to build and maintain relationships with employees working offsite, especially within larger working groups.

Business leaders can address this by deploying HD-quality video solutions to simulate the experience and rapport of being in the same room with the larger team.

In fact, the best solutions are easy to use — so employees actually use the technology — and allow as many as 100 participants in a single meeting.

While video conferencing may once have been complicated, expensive and only realistically available in an office, high quality video solutions are now intuitive and located on employees' desktops.

Video allows companies to avoid sinking significant cost into travel, instead leveraging audio from any computer, mobile device or phone.

Many companies then find that these same solutions apply to their interactions with customers and vendors, as well, quickly becoming essential to managing budgets and relationships across the business.

Streamline communication with the right technology solutions

Having the right technology is never more important than when teams are collaborating with remote employees.

Deploying the best cloud-based communications solutions will empower productive conversation and enable seamless work beyond the office and across any device without difficulty.

For example, offering company-wide group chat on all devices will allow team members to nimbly discuss issues and answer quick questions from remote locations — and still more efficiently when the technology displays each employee's availability, or "presence."

An efficient cloud-based call center will ensure that clients and customers can call a central office, have a high-quality experience and be connected directly with the person they're looking for — even if that person is remote.

By opting for fully cloud-based solutions, businesses can securely extend these communications capabilities to remote employees — even within a BYOD environment.

Businesses with remote employees stand to particularly benefit from the right cloud-based IP phone system, which offers features such as mobile twinning, which involves sending inbound calls to an employee's mobile phone and desk phone simultaneously, and ensuring employees are available to customers anytime, anywhere.

Leverage the cloud to reduce costs and quickly scale

For any business that has not already moved its applications and servers to the cloud, managing remote employees makes that transition even more beneficial.

Leveraging geo-redundant, cloud-based storage keeps company data securely accessible for employees working outside of the office.

One hundred percent cloud-based software is managed and updated off-site; therefore, updating a system is no longer a hassle, and IT expenses and burdens are reduced. Since a vendor stores the data, they are also responsible for taking care of uptime and ensuring that data remains secure — with the critical added benefit of making the business better prepared to weather disruptions and disasters.

Virtual private networks, or VPNs, are commonly used for remote access, but this method is less cost effective and more difficult to scale up as the remote workforce grows.

Companies should look for a vendor that uses an SLA-driven infrastructure that offers a wide portfolio of secure, purpose-built, scalable cloud services to help lower the costs of maintaining and scaling hardware and software resources.

Years ago, I witnessed the $100,000 installation of a business phone system in the home of a CEO who wanted his home office to function identically to his work office. Fortunately, working seamlessly from home is no longer such an extreme technological undertaking.

The introduction of sophisticated, cloud-based, unified communications technology allows companies and HR leaders to affordably extend telecommuting options to a workforce that values flexibility.

And with America's remote workforce poised for continued growth, businesses must understand and embrace the role of cloud technology in simplifying operations, reducing costs and fostering close, collaborative teams.