Now that the initial smoke has cleared a bit on the COVID-19 situation, the time seems right to think ahead when it comes to “Working from Home”.
We have seen all the “ad hoc”, almost panic-like, trials and errors on facilitating our employees to enable them to stay somehow productive. I believe it is chaos out there. The list of communication and collaboration tools is endless. And, some truly relevant ingredients are totally lacking
I have been “preaching” Office 365/Microsoft 365 for years now, and of the last 2 years or so, focused a lot on security and governance. Integration, security and governance is right there, out of the box, Built-in instead of Bolt-on. We should be starting to deploy that in a controlled environment, enabling our workforces to work from home effectively, safely and secure. While the Organization stays in control. It may take a couple of weeks to get it up and running, true. But if we don’t, the chaos and spaghetti that is being created right now, will only become bigger and bigger. No control, bad actors out there, no clue on who is doing what and how and where and when.
We should not forget that most organizations have their Line of Business applications and their File repositories in their local Data Centers without having proper remote access facilities configured. There are plenty of solutions out there to enable access to those resources remotely. We need to look at short term solutions and plan for long term solutions in parallel. The times of “ad hoc” and “panic” are over.
Now is the time to sit down and make a plan that enables Organizations and individuals to achieve more, even in these weird times.