The last few months have certainly been challenging for businesses. A country wide lockdown has forced most companies to close their offices and have their staff work from home where possible. As you can imagine, this made a business like ours very busy for 3-4 weeks ensuring all of our customers had the ability to work remotely.

Luckily, most of our customers gave some staff the capacity to work remotely before all of this kicked off so it was just a matter of bolting on other users to the existing setups.

So, What Does That Look Like?

Well, all of our customers are different. You have a number that have all of their services locally (Onsite Exchange Server), some that have a mix of hosted and local services (Hosted Emails plus an Onsite Data Server) and others that are completely cloud based (Office 365).

As well as accessing data from home we also had to consider redirecting phone calls for the customers we have on our VOIP solution. Here, we will detail certain jobs we needed to carry out before lockdown to ensure our customers could continue operating.

Challenges

The first problem was the lack of laptops our customers had. Most did have a pool of laptops that were used when staff had to work remotely, but they never had everyone working from home at the same time!

Different customers had different requirements. Some just needed standard laptops to enable them to remote into their office PC whilst others wanted high spec laptops that were to become their only machine both in and out of the office.

Before they went out to clients, all laptops were equipped with antivirus software to protect them against cyber nasties. In some cases we also installed encryption software to protect businesses against any data leaks if a laptop was misplaced or stolen.

It was then a matter of delivering the laptops to the customer. Most laptops were delivered within 2-3 days of the customer placing the order. A very quick turnaround during a chaotic time!

Another job we needed to undertake was setting up office PCs so workers could remote into them when working from home.

A number of our customers already had this facility.

This set up was handled by both going onsite to the customer or done remotely from our office. An individual PC would take 10-15 minutes to set up. This allowed us to get through a large amount of customers each day. If the situation allowed, we would set up the laptop the user would be operating at home at the same time. If this wasn’t available then it wasn’t a major issue as the remote connection could be set up when they were at home.

One final tweak we needed to make for customers was to redirect their calls from their phone system.

There were a couple of ways we could do this:

• We could either redirect the calls to a different landline or a mobile phone. This way they could still accept calls as if they were in the office. One downside is they can’t call out on their office number. They would have to use a different phone to make outbound calls.
• Another solution for redirecting calls was to set them up with a softphone solution. This is where calls are routed to the user’s laptop. They can then accept calls through a piece of software and using a headset plugged into the laptop. Not only can they accept calls but they can make calls as well as if they were in the office. A very handy tool for the current climate.

Looking Back…

It definitely was a busy few weeks for us on the lead up to and after lockdown. We put the extra effort in to ensure all of our customers could still operate from home and it is proving to have been worth the exertion.

Our clients experienced no interruption to their workflow and are still working 4 months in. Many have expressed their gratitude with the quick response to their requests.

We continue to support their systems from our homes. We can handle any individual user issues and carry out our scheduled maintenance checks remotely with 99% of problems being resolved under lockdown conditions.

We were even able to talk a customer through changing their wifi adapter over the phone which is normally something we need to do hands on!

Many things have changed over the last few months but we are still there for our customers and their IT needs. Please get in touch if your business IT system is struggling during the current situation and we can lend a hand.