Five ways to help your customers prepare for potential coronavirus disruption

CEO of MSP Managed on where customers and partners need to be looking as the coronavirus continues to spread

At the time of writing the number of cases of coronavirus within the UK is relatively small. It could be something that disappears as quickly as it came, or it could be here for a while.

While there is plenty of good advice on limiting the spread of the disease, we thought it a good time to put together a five-point IT systems plan which we hope will be useful as part of your planning and co-ordination.

We're not looking to profit from the incident, so we have drawn a clear line in that this will be advisory. We don't even sell a few of the solutions mentioned in this article, for example telephony and 4G dongles.

We are by no means the oracle of this situation, but there appears to be no consistency in the advice coming from the government so, as always, it's down to businesses to find the solutions.

Many larger organisations will have their own contingencies in place but may not consider all employees across all offices no longer attending a business premise.

There is an opportunity to test the resilience of remote working and to evaluate and ask questions of the IT systems and processes a business has in place.

1. Evaluate and test remote working tools

Individuals and groups may be required to work away from the firm's main offices. This could be all employees within your organisation.

Consider looking at your customers' VPN Licences such as Cisco AnyConnect for accessing on-premise, hybrid and private datacentres. Do they have enough licences to cover all employees and have all users been tested to work?

Look at licensing and training for products such as Microsoft Teams or Cisco Webex. Customers may have these already but are yet to utilise them. Teams is wrapped into many Office365 bundles at no cost.

Do they have enough licences for cloud applications should more people start to use them remotely?

2. Evaluate the number of desktop machines

Desktop only users - can those users access via remote desktop securely from their home machines?

Can you swap desktops for laptops?

Do you have a pool of laptops you can use to disperse to employees/groups with a standard image?

3. Telephony

Are they running a cloud PBX such as Mitel or RingCentral, or a legacy on-premise solution?

Can they enable soft phones for employees?

Do they have the ability to redirect calls through a central portal in case it's required?

Can they redirect legacy systems to home or mobile phone numbers?

Talk to your telephony vendor/supplier and discuss the requirements for remote working.

4. Connectivity

Undertake a survey across employees to understand home users' internet bandwidth.

For homeworkers with limited internet bandwidth, check 4G coverage and supply those employees with 4G Data-Only SIM card, or allow pairing with mobile phones.

Should the user have poor connectivity at home and poor 4G coverage, is there a relative or an alternative house they could go to in order for them to work?

Do all users need full access to all systems or can some work with a subset?

5. User testing

Consider group testing. For example, let the finance team or HR team work from home and test speeds and application capability as part of user testing.

The positive thing is that many IT services and systems teams will have many of the systems and processes in place already to cover all-employee remote working.

Whatever the outcome, it will be a great test for IT service and service desk teams across the globe.

This article first appeared on LinkedIn