We are in the middle of unpredictable crisis, projected to have long term impact and to overcome smoothly, companies must transform and adapt the changes quickly.
Implementation of Immediate and long-term measures are needed, and information technology will play a vital role in it.
Immediate measures;
Business permanency is the major challenge where IT must ensure that critical employees can work from home by having the availability of the following crucial services.
- Communication tools such as online meeting applications. Skype, Microsoft Team etc. it is advised not to use video conferencing until extremely necessary to avoid bandwidth breakdown as most of the resources will not be available from service providers.
- Shared resources such as One drive, dropbox This helps users to share their work remotely.
- VPN tunnel for secured data in and out. Staff can work remotely on software from home.
- Availability of IT Help Desk to provide remote support to all employees who are working from home.
- Remote access software installation such as Anydesk, TeamViewer for critical employees to ensure quick support when needed.
Long term measures;
By analyzing the gap of current IT resources vs cost vs utilization. This gap-analysis plays a major role as it will help any organization to minimize the cost without affecting the structure and quality of services. This process basically categories as adjustment to cope up with this current situation.
By reviewing contracts of all sizes to determine the actual requirement vs the services cost. In this reviewing process the term “Force Majeure” will be applied. Although most force majeure provisions are not linked to diseases, epidemics, almost all includes predicted provisions such as natural disasters etc. or “other unavoidable circumstances. However, The COVID19 presents an exclusive situation that includes both a naturally occurring aspect and an action of the government in response to this outbreak, both have diversified impacts and service providers will also be looking to ease their terms and services to match customer’s ground position, in order to keep long term business relationship.
The bottom line
Although coronavirus is not something that companies have predicted and based their expense and budget on but – it should be considered as a wakeup call for the continuation of business for today and future.
Information technology seems to be playing major role than ever before as companies have to quickly adapt the changes in market and this requires flexibility and scalability in their existing technological infrastructure.
Muhammad Abdur Rehman.
The writer is an IT expert.