Adrian Dalli
Mar 20, 2020
Adrian Dalli
Mar 20, 2020
With the COVID-19 outbreak come several concerns for organisations in general, and CIOs in particular.
As many governments advise everyone to stay and home, and making appeals to companies to enable telework for their employees, CEOs and whole organisations are turning to their CIOs for solutions. Quickly. And available in the most secure manner.
Many companies did not wait for authorities to tell them what to do, as the financial situation worsens, it is clear that all businesses need to move swiftly to a remote work set-up..
Businesses need to shift technological capacity and invest in secure and scalable platforms in order to migrate their teams to work remotely.
Each organisation has different realities, but there are some best practice approaches that, from our experience, apply across.
The need for social distancing mandates telework, that’s a given. So the next step for CIOs is gather information as to which employees can work remotely, what resources they require, and what technologies and system should be made available to them. Exposing a CRM or an ERP solution remotely might be straightforward for some, whereas other CIOs need to jump complex hurdles of legacy apps being made available, once again securely. A second dimension relates to the standard office productivity tools to be made available. In our experience, Office 365 is a solution for practically all customer requirements in this regard, but it is strongly suggested to look beyond this, and factoring in issues such as mobility and security.
The security of the IT infrastructure should obviously be solid, but this also extends to the end devices (laptops / tablets / desktops) the remote employees are using from home. Device security is not just securing against obvious risks, but also ensuring that the connectivity, data transfer and applications being used are secured and under control too..
CIOs therefore need to update the policies and train employees to work remotely if necessary.
These productivity, security and mobility requirements can be achieved through Microsoft 365 which provides access to Office 365 and tools such as Microsoft Teams, but also to a range of security and mobility tools to maintain security and control as a CIO.
CIOs need to analyse the current state of the company and determine who can work remotely.
Once they have determined the people who can work remotely, they need to make available the required infrastructure and systems to enable this. They also need to find effective tools that can handle that kind of workload as well as provide solid security measurements so none of the data or systems get compromised.
If, for any reason, you think that your infrastructure, or systems, and not yet ready for telework, feel free to reach out to us. We have already helped a number of customers achieve this in a speedy manner, by providing a quick-to-deploy cloud solution that also allows for legacy migration, as well as the right set of productivity tools to close the circle in terms of requirements – so just let us know.
