It might sound obvious, but if there is one thing every organisation has learnt over recent weeks, it is that effective business continuity strategy starts with the human factor. If your people can't work, neither can your business.
At the time of writing this piece the world is in an unprecedented situation, with thousands of people suddenly joining the ranks of home workers, in an attempt to contain the spread of the Covid-19 virus.
Quite apart from the difficult decisions we have all faced around how we live and work, and look after our loved ones, the aim to maintain business as usual has proved to be a real headache for organisations that were unprepared for a huge change to traditional working practices.
While many of us now expect to be able to access systems and data fairly easily from wherever we are, there is a big difference between an organisation’s IT team supporting a handful of home workers, and coping with the entire staff base working from home. Every organisation and situation is different, but there are some basic principles to consider.
SECURITY – this should be paramount. Your staff need access to systems and information just as if they were in the office, but they must be protected by the same level of security. Your firewall may be perfectly adequate when you have 50 staff working remotely, but not be up to the job if you suddenly need to protect 150.
If your organisation already runs on a software as a service (SaaS) model such as Microsoft Office 365 youre ahead of the game. Your staff will already be familiar with multi factor authentication, which means being required to submit at least two pieces of information before being given access to the system, and using collaborative tools such as Teams, which comes included in Office 365 and allows workers to share files, make calls, run meetings and generally carry on working as a team with colleagues and partners. UPSCALING COMPUTING – employers tell us their biggest concern is how to scale up their infrastructure as and when needed, without unnecessary or long term cost.
One answer is to use rapid deployment templates, which can be serviced on a pay as you go basis. By using a hybrid cloud model delivered via our Tier 3 27001-certified data centre, our team can quickly and securely replicate your server to massively increase capacity. Once you have added in the required number of licences it would allow staff at home to log in via a virtual private network (VPN) for as long as needed. The replication element could then be deleted when things are back to normal, so you only pay for what you need, when you need it.
COMMUNICATIONS – connectivity is key but not everyone has the latest IT kit at home, and some staff may live in areas with limited broadband connections. Solutions such as Microsoft Remote Desktop Services can get around poor communications by essentially making your PC act like a dumb terminal connected to the server.
If you are concerned that some staff may have older PCs or ones that lack the latest antivirus software, there are a range of practical solutions that your IT partner can help you to apply.
Don’t be caught out, talk to our experts here at ITPS, and make sure you have a solution to keep your business up and running, whatever life throws at us.