Hello guys:
For all of us who praised, for long time, that home-office was a "must have" in many industries, we are somehow saddened to realize that it took a pandemic - with a huge toll for everybody - to make this finally happen.
Some executives, very old school, who were strongly against it under the belief that "if I don't see you working, you're doing nothing" are now pushing IT for better, faster and safer ways to make people work remotely.
This has been an eye-opening situation for everybody and we can easily detect that some lessons must be learnt.
How long was it since you last tested your BCP & DRPs? If you didn't, I guess it looks perfect on paper. Do all your key stakeholders or C-Suite executives have a hard copy at hand? Thorough testing and updating is part of the job IT guys.
Were your telecomm prepared to receive inbound connection requests to your corporate network infrastructure? Or everything was set to default? Maybe 20 to 25 connections only? If not, was it able to receive hundreds of connections?
Having a few colleagues in telecommuting - before Covid-19 - was as normal as can be but having nearly ALL OF THEM is a whole new ball game and surely did stress all your controls.
Undoubtedly that helped bring out the best of everybody in the IT & Telecomms communities to be able to deal with this unwanted issue and perform a satisfactory services business resumption.
This brings along an even more important challenge. Local ISPs along Latin America were not prepared, and have done little to improve their service delivery. With limited bandwidth, high latency, and very unclear SLAs, home connections in places where service was delivered in copper were easily degraded back to the "dial-up" modem days. Even F/O connections providers must/should declare the "aggregation rate" level. Mergers in this market haven't fulfilled expectations. Unfortunately not all countries consider that among their regulations.
If we want to sort out the hassle that telecommuting means to our internal customers, we should first agree with the ISPs what level of service can be delivered in A, B or C zones of the city or multiple locations. It's time for companies' IT areas to test those partnerships and make sure that they can adjust the pipe that brings in all connections to avoid performance exhaustion.
Only then we can move to what device is the best in terms of robustness, processing, memory handling, battery life, the VPN or your Cloud provider of choice.
Today, we must face the fact that this complete interface has become "mission critical", something in the past reserved for the ERP. Without the remote connectivity, the videoconferencing, the access to the data - whether its cloud or on premise - there is no way we can continue operating.
So, first is first, make sure your connections and those of your internal customers are a "two-way street". Your internal customers will be grateful and IT reputation will soar.
