Things people forget when moving to Work@Home due to Coronavirus

This weekend, many of our clients are moving from a work at office to work at home model due to the Covid-19 related developments. Because we’ve had almost 20 years experience refining our own work at home model, we can speak from lessons learned on how to do it right the first time.

I’ve asked our CTO Matt Alexander to list the top three IT-related things that were missing in the initial plans presented to him. Here’s his list:

Shortage of Laptops

1. There’s a run on laptops from all major suppliers. Don’t assume you will get what you need.
2. You may think your BCP/lease clauses get you laptops when you need them. Not so when thousands of companies have triggered their BCP plans – all in one week!

Network quality at home

1. Do not assume everything will work without a hitch just because your employee has a ‘broadband’ connection at home.
2. Some employees may need high bandwidth data connection and a high-quality audio/video/screen-share conferencing facility. You won’t know until you test it. Have a speed test ready for employees to test their home network before you send their work home.
3. Mundane things like lack of ports on home router or length of cable needed to connect a desktop VoIP phone can scuttle work for a few days. Again, test now before you send the work home.

Review the security and compliance requirements

1. A setup that works well in an office situation may not cut it when it’s sent home with your employee.
2. Do you need to disable USB ports and Optical Drives?
3. Do you need to install something like Microsoft RDS, Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, VMware Horizon?