After a few days of working on Coronavirus-19 actions Enterprise Information Technology (IT) has learned more lessons. Here are several lessons are from fast mover organizations that have rapidly responded to changes in the workplace spurred by the virus:
The ‘contingency’ plans to cope with new demands may have proved inadequate. With the changes brought on by this crisis (social distancing, remote work) Gaps are found in:
1. Security, network management, and monitoring is not focused on ‘remote’ usage.
Lesson Learned: Price optional modules and capacity even if you don’t have an immediate need, and then cross-train enough people to pull-in for a ‘surge’.
Today’s Action Items:
Add technology, people, and process to the Network Operations Center(NOC) and the backup NOC!
Ask your in-house security team what is not being done – and if you need it by tomorrow to reduce risks protecting data in motion and at rest.
2. Web applications (like Dropbox, GoogleDocs, Office365) still need desktop level support and help when working with other enterprises also trying to collaborate, setup new supply chains, and workflow across groups.
Lesson Learned: New task and process skills are needed to work across groups.
Today’s Action Items: “Just in Time Training” still works: so pull aside strong trainers to build ‘recipes’ and training aids for your people to use right now. Look for and recommend YouTube and supplier videos that work to train people who are remote (and less embarrassed to train in private). Keep helpful news and hints flowing to people away from the enterprise campus. Add support staff to handle questions across time zones and work schedules.
3. Equipment isn’t always available when you want it. Supply chains of favored enterprise hardware vendors are disrupted.
Lesson Learned: Qualifying and testing multiple brands of platforms and devices costs time and money – more in a crisis.
Today’s Action Items: Start paying now, as this will take time. Supporting more platforms already in-hand is a start on capacity soon if you can’t get favored platforms.
4. People capacity to work multiple high-demands at the same time is not available. There’s been no time to get more resources brought up to speed, so problems back up.
Lesson Learned: When you cut, and cut big now, there is a pool of resources at need.
Today’s Action Item: If you haven’t stopped doing something big, decide today to cut big. If you have cut already prioritize needs and teams that can effectively apply reallocated resources.
5. Some fixes for work-at-home / remote-work have pushed the problems to new bottlenecks. Redundant routers / load-balancers / routing capacity are needed when new bandwidth comes online. Without a sufficient spare pool break/fix for BYOD demanded by new remote workers simply hurts. Pooled licenses are hard to use when the license server isn’t easy over a WAN/VPN.
Lesson Learned: Capacity and fault tolerance increase TCO and gain options for a crisis.
Today’s Action Items: Test backups. Network backups, applications’ storage backups, backup compute centers – if these haven’t had a full test – start testing today.
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