The coronavirus (COVID-19)
outbreak has officially been categorized by the World Health Organization (WHO)
as a pandemic, meaning infection is accelerating in multiple countries
concurrently. The United States of America has declared travel bans on 28
European countries, many countries have closed schools and universities, and
large gatherings of people have been stopped.
High-profile companies such
as Google and Microsoft are encouraging or mandating that staff adopt a
work-from-home policy. For modern tech companies, the infrastructure and policy
needed for remote working are unquestionably already in place and the vast
majority of staff members are probably already laptop users.
For many smaller companies
and organizations, however, the situation is likely to be very different.
Remote working is probably limited to a few, and realistically mainly for email
and other non-operational systems. The education sector is a good case in
point: universities have been delivering distance learning as a feature for
some time, while high schools and others are mainly dependent on staff and
pupils being on-site to learn. The school’s operations and administrative teams
also need to be considered, as they are unlikely to be mobile workers and may
be using desktop devices rather than laptops.
Breaking the organization
into just a few groups with differing requirements and dealing with the needs
of each to effect the mass exodus may seem a simplistic approach, but is
probably essential given the urgency in some cases. Using education as an
example, there are students (the customers), teaching faculty, administration
and operations. The school can’t run without significant student engagement,
teachers at least need virtual conferencing facilities and the administration
teams need network access, and this is the minimum.
Read the complete article
on https://www.welivesecurity.com/2020/03/16/covid19-forced-workplace-exodus/