Remote Workplace Solutions
Enabling a Remote Workforce Quickly
With the COVID-19 World Pandemic actively affecting businesses worldwide, many businesses even in Calgary and Alberta have found themselves facing sudden and unexpected changes in the way they operate. This has created situations where it’s important to get their workforce quickly setup to work from home.
Business Continuity Considerations
There are many factors to consider to setting up a workforce to work from home.
- Which business operations can be managed remotely and which ones need to be done onsite? If a key business unit is shutdown, do you have alternate plans to ensure continuity?
- What tools do you currently have in place for remote connectivity? What equipment do staff need to take home with them? Can staff take their office phone with them? Do they have the necessary hardware to connect their office phone at home?
- Can critical business data be protected outside your company network? Are staff aware of and trained in how to properly protect company data?
- Is your existing network infrastructure flexible enough to allow additional remote access? Do you have enough internet bandwidth and system resources to handle the additional remote workload?
- Do you have a Disaster Recovery Plan? Could your business continue to operate if the office is inaccessible?
How to Maintain Business Continuity
With staff no longer working in the same space, it’s important to have effective communication between your staff and customers. You may find that you need to purchase additional equipment, upgrade internet bandwidth and install and setup additional software or hardware solutions to maintain day to day operations.
Security Considerations
It’s important to also consider how company data is protected. Setting up remote access means that data needs to be protected at additional endpoints outside your business such as on mobile phones, tablets, laptops and computers. Can you mitigate the additional risks involved in the increased exposure? You may need to put in place additional auditing and security restrictions in place to protect the most private data in your network.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, criminals have also been busy taking advantage of the crisis to increase the number of phishing emails being used to target organizations. Throughout March into April, there has been a sharp increase in domain names registered for such purposes. Employees need to be aware of attempts to steal data or otherwise compromise business systems with such attacks.
IT Solutions for Working from Home
| Cloud Infrastructure Services Cloud services offer powerful advantages as they move the burden of maintaining on premise infrastructure into a hosted service. These services offer significant scalability, redundancy and reliability for business systems. Such services allow you to quickly handle changing business needs by allocating additional resources in response to changing requirements. Services such as eSignatures for eDocuments, VOIP Technologies and Remote Productivity Monitoring are all great examples. | Collaboration Solutions Group collaboration solutions such as Office 365 allow staff to work from their homes or while on the road. Create group meetings, share files, chat, manage emails and make audio and video calls with customers and staff. Solutions need to tightly integrate into existing business systems, whether services are hosted online, or you are using on premise server systems. |
| VPN (Virtual Private Networking) Remote access to corporate networks using VPN software allows encrypted access to files and resources at the office network from home or at a customer’s premises. | Remote Desktop Services Staff interact directly with programs and files setup on the company network from home without having to install and maintain programs on offsite workstations. |
| Mobile Device Technologies Increasingly, cell phone and tablets now provide tools to consume digital information on the go, freeing staff to be significantly more mobile. Email, remote monitoring, cloud file storage and digital voice communications are examples of a long list of tools available for companies to utilize. |
If you need help getting your staff to work from home efficiently please contact us.