Quarantined!

Here we are, one week into a pretty much mandatory work from home situation. This of course excludes the essential personnel, who are really doing the hard work (EMT, Doctors, Nurses, Fire rescue, etc.). In an effort to make sure everyone is able to stay home the IT team needs to react.

The rest of us have a job to do too. Not only do we need to stay away from each other to avoid spreading the Corona Virus, but we also need to do as much work as we can to keep the economy going. The more work we can get done during these quarantine days the less behind we’ll be when things get back to normal. Which hopefully will help the economy bounce back with a vengeance.

I am seeing a lot of companies scramble to create a strategy that can keep their users engaged. I have put together a list of some technology and ideology that has worked out well. I’ll also provide some insight into some newer tech to get some serious stuff done too.

Basic survival

These things should be pretty obvious. My first recommendation is to step back and take a look at what your requirements are. Who/What technologies do you need to support to do the most amount of business possible with employees at home. You’ll likely need to communicate with the business folks on this one. Find out what they want to see operational for the next 2-6 weeks. Most of us know what these technologies should be but definitely ask, because your answers could be different from what’s important to the CEO or VP of Sales.

For some of you this may be as simple as getting your users laptops so they can login to email, if they don’t have a home PC. If that’s you consider your self lucky. For others it may require the use of some very basic tech that’s been around a long time. Also, assess your technology situation. Which Apps are on premise, which are cloud based, and lastly which are SaaS?

VPN

If you have on-prem or even cloud hosted IaaS you’ll likely find that VPN is going to be a good solution for you. This is a technology you’re already likely using and hopefully all you’ll have to do is ramp up license counts. Here are a few things to lookout for

1. Does your VPN/Firewall appliance support the number of users I need to have remote

   1. Check the datasheets from the hardware vendor, they publish maximums there

2. Is my VPN using Multifactor authentication (MFA)

   1. if it is you’ll have to ramp up those licenses too, and deploy the tokens or Apps to the end users

3. Can my users get access to the things they need with my existing VPN config

   1. This is a good time to check those FW rules and make sure users have access to everything they need, but equally important make sure they don’t have access to unnecessary systems or data.

4. Internet bandwidth

   1. Remember that if your users are coming in over VPN, they are chewing up internet bandwidth from the site they are connecting to. If you have 200 new users connecting over VPN to do their job, and each one does even 1Mbps of traffic that’s an extra 200Mbps. Luckily many of the big bandwidth providers can virtually expand your circuit, especially if you’ve got a newer circuit.

Collaboration

Utilization of cloud software to do primary users tasks like email and team collaboration is key. Many organizations have turned to Microsoft and Google for offerings like Office 365 and G-suite. As an example users using office 365 mailboxes with teams can likely do 90% of their job activities in two windows. Utilizing outlook to manage email communication as well as calendar, coupled with Teams for instant message and internal/external file collaboration. If your organization is really on board with the cloud, you may have even deployed the collaboration parts of teams, to include PSTN and other calling. In this case your user can function as if they were in the office. They can make and receive calls on their normal office number.

If you haven’t done much with the phones yet, many of the old school IP based phone systems support call forwarding to a cell number, which can be used. One word of caution here is if you use call forwarding you’ll be using 1 line for incoming call and another to send it back out to a cell, so your call capacity will be cut in half.

Advanced Cases

Some organizations may require a more advanced capability in this remote access game. Be sure to choose the right tool for the job here. Enterprises with raised security concerns may require users to remote into a desktop/shared desktop space to gain access to sensitive applications and/or data. The other scenario this comes into play is for latency sensitive applications where connectivity to an app over the WAN is impossible, therefore if they connect to a VM in the datacenter they can connect to the app at LAN speed and just send screen scrapes back to the client desktop.

RDS/VDI

If you’ve deployed VDI or RDS, scaling it up to support more users could be an option. Companies using RDS/VDI solutions are usually looking for a unified experience for their users every time they login. It also typically offers lower latency to traditional applications located in the datacenter. If you don’t have something like this already deployed in your own datacenter don’t do this on your own. These deployments are very complex and require precision accuracy to deliver a good end user experience. I’ve done a lot of VDI deployments and the one sure thing that you can do to get your users mad at you is give a poor desktop experience. A lot goes into that desktop experience from providing enough disk performance to optimizing the windows 10 image. The design seems like it should be easy, but it’s not.

Also consider the fact that this large increase in work from home is likely to be temporary, although after seeing the amount of work from home that can be done, the business may ask to make some of this more permanent. You can look to leverage cloud in this case. Even companies like VMware have a good partnership with cloud providers to extend your VDI out to Azure https://techzone.vmware.com/blog/introducing-vmware-workspace-one-cloud-based-reference-architecture

Azure also has direct capabilities you can leverage

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-desktop/

Nice thing about cloud is you pay as you go. It may cost you more in the long run if you were to deploy this for more permanent use, but in this temporary case it may be a good idea to leverage something like this. It can be stood up quick, without the need of procuring hardware. Big thing with either of these extensions to the cloud is not to underestimate the networking component here. There will likely be a need for extensive consultation around this aspect, including security.

What do I do?

In short, grab the bull by the horns and get people what they need. If you need help reach out to your friendly local SnowCap sales person or engineer, this is something we can absolutely help with.