Work From Home During COVID-19: What Companies Need To Do To Keep 'IT' Going

No one ever imagined that every employee in the world would become a remote worker. The COVID-19 pandemic has ensured this, though not by choice but by default.

As per Gartner¡¯s HR survey of March 2020, 88 per cent of global organisations recommended work from home to their employees. In India too, most organisations ¨C be it a retail company or a bank, are implementing work from home for the majority of their employees.

Working from home, a fate unforeseen

Typically, IT heads or chief information officers (CIOs) in an organisation anticipate likely disruptions to business, build pertinent capacity and flexibility in their IT. However, no one could have foreseen the current situation that still seems so improbable and colossal. Moving to a completely remote working model is emerging as a great challenge for scores of organisations. What¡¯s more, some experts suggest that lockdowns could be a regular fare for the next two years to combat the outbreak.

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Therefore, while organisations may have planned for immediate business continuity and productivity, they may have overlooked ways to bolster up their IT systems for prolonged remote working. Here is what organisations can do to ensure that their employees, communications networks and their ability to work together are not disrupted during a crisis like Coronavirus. In essence, they can fortify their IT mechanisms through these four simple steps:

Take advantage of cloud-based flexibility

The best thing about cloud computing is that IT heads need not worry about paying for extra compute capacity. Cloud offers a pay-as-you-use model while helping organisations plan for redundancy at scale. More importantly, multi-cloud models provide the flexibility to move data and applications across public and private clouds without affecting work. Organisations can look at ¡®as-a-service¡¯ strategy wherein they can give access to cloud-based tools, applications and platforms at scale to their employees across the world with reduced risk of service disruption.

Organisations can hedge their bets by using a pool of cloud providers to supplement provisioning and capacity. By simply sharing responsibility for infrastructure among different cloud partners, organisations can reduce the risk of single points of failure and keep their IT systems ready for the new normal of remote working.

Prepare for sudden demand

As with compute power, organisations need to be ready to deal with increased demand for bandwidth during unexpected events such as COVID-19. They can gear up by leveraging modern approaches to networking, authentication and security.

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By using software-defined wide area networks, IT departments can put in place, excess capacity without taxing limited resources. Further, organisations can apply contextual and multi-factor authentication, something that has become common for enhancing the security of smartphone and digital payments, to their IT systems as well for the enhanced security of their employees¡¯ devices when working from home. This is called a zero-trust security strategy that also helps reduce the reliance on Virtual Private Networks (VPN). Many organisations provide VPN, which simply put, is an encrypted connection over the internet from an employee¡¯s device to their network.

Organisations can avoid routing excessive traffic over the internet by using dedicated connections for employees who consume the most bandwidth. Lastly, to ensure access to multiple clouds, each VPN hub should have access to at least two different service providers.

Empower remote workers

IT departments can empower remote employees to work productively wherever they are ¨C be it office, a client location or from their home by rolling out modern workforce practices. First, they need to define a remote working strategy with clear policies and guidelines. Another idea is to train employees on remote working etiquette as many employees may find themselves in unchartered territory ¨C as they may not be used to the concept of remote working.

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Organisations can enable remote employees by providing access to a digital environment replete with communications tools and virtual collaboration spaces. Cybersecurity training tailored for remote working will be useful too. Lest they forget, organisations should remember that senior leaders are remote workers too in the COVID-19 times. So tools like WebEx-enabled leadership teams or boards should be provided to enable senior leaders to work effectively.

Make workforce agile

Organisations can apply the underlying principles of agile methodology, used in software development to the workforce. They should not shy away from making the requisite investments in a productive, modern IT environment necessary for remote working.

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In a remote working environment, meetings can go on endlessly so organisations should define minimum viable meetings and pare them by pre-defining teams, meeting structure and duration in advance. Importantly, the CIO team of an organisation should meet every day to take stock of the company¡¯s digital estate (capacity and usage trend data) so they can shift resources as needed and based on time zones and demand from their remote employees across the globe.

At a time when there is a question mark on business continuity, the spotlight is on the CIOs as they scramble to implement contingency plans. The good news is that more technology resources are available to them than ever before. No one imagined the scenario we find ourselves in, but by making enterprise IT ready for Coronavirus times, remote workplaces can become the harbingers of the future.

About the author: Lingraju Sawkar is the General Manager, Global Technology Services at IBM India / South Asia