Work from home: Is your business’s IT environment ready for the challenge during Covid-19 outbreak?

Work from home: Is your business’s IT environment ready for the challenge during COVID-19 outbreak?

Panicked responses to the infamous Covid-19 have triggered strange, yet substantial adaptation in remote collaboration innovations in work places all around the world. It’s not however, just large companies that are suffering in the wake of panic. Some SMBs are also taking cautionary measures for employees to work from home to avoid any chance of virus spreading among the staff.

An ideal remote working environment

In hindsight, businesses have been heavily deploying tools such as Microsoft Team, Zoom, Slack, and other remote team collaboration tools for employees to leverage during this difficult time. However, the more concurrent users working online simultaneously, the heavier the resources and loading these service providers have to allocate. Consequently, we have to ask ourselves again, does a good remote and team collaboration environment only constitutes of the applications mentioned above, or there should be more to it? The answer should be more complex than a yes or no.

An ideal remote working environment is more than just utilizing collaboration tools provided online. The entire IT infrastructure, including networking and storage systems, needs serious reforms in order for businesses to ensure they have the capacity to host multiple users simultaneously, and to provide a stable and secure workflow for employees to operate remotely. Traditionally, companies leverage traditional file server such as Windows file server to store and sync company data, unless employees access the file servers using VPN, this framework conventionally was designed only for delivering services within the company’s network. Thus, that is why so many companies utilizes the hybrid cloud infrastructure such as the most common combination of Windows server and public clouds drives. Of course, this common practice often is being viewed as overly complicated, not to mention the added complexity in terms of unstructured and duplicated data, and resource allocation when adapting third party team collaboration tools. Having a sophisticated on-premise server with built-in remote access may definitely help with eliminating issues with remote team collaboration, unstructured data, and various security issues.

Remote team collaboration tool – network attached storage

With the recent rising demand in not just corporate remote collaboration mechanism but also stable and secure IT environment, a network attached storage (NAS) may just be the solution for businesses struggling with the problems mentioned above. Solution such as Synology NAS offers built-in collaboration tool that allows employees to edit files concurrently, and instant messaging app for team communication.

Additionally, such solution resonates the benefits of both Windows server and Google Drive, which allow files to be retrieved via mapped network drive, sync client, web portal or mobile app, all without the hassle of using VPN services.

Last but not least, what may come as a surprise is the cost benefit that businesses may experience. The accumulative expenses contribute by the Windows server Client Access Licenses (CAL), public cloud storage license, and SaaS licenses may be drastically saved when deploying solutions like Synology’s as most features mentioned are completely license free.

With a solution that meets all of the criteria for working remotely, SMBs and enterprises may still operate normally even during a difficult time with so many employees work from home protocol without blowing up the budget out of proportion With COVID-19 stirring up so much uncertainty globally, the primary task a company should prioritize is to provide its employees a complete and consistent team collaboration infrastructure to not only ensures the continuation of the business, but also safeguards employees’ and their families’ wellbeing.

(Contributed by Shannon Chang, Senior Marketing Manager, Synology Inc.)