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Stress testing your Remote Working strategy

Unified Comms
As the workforce transitions to Remote Working several businesses are stress testing to ensure their services don't fall over as employees connect to the business from outside the network. I wrote a piece on the importance of stress testing last week, the importance cannot be understated.

Paul Gibbs, Sales Director at MyPhones, shared his experiences from within the business. "The unprecedented situation we are in is definitely testing the technology and policies business have put in place to cater for unexpected events such as fire, flood and power outages, however, I think it is safe to say no-one expected the true test to be the result of a global pandemic.

What started as a well thought out plan, for each of our employees to do couple of days at home to make sure the VPN access, softphones and UC Clients all worked and just as importantly staff knew how to plug their equipment in, access files and contact directories, soon escalated.

All was well for the first few days, then the virus really took hold. Before we knew it. we had a third of team off, plugging in, testing and working.

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That third rapidly went to operating a weekly rotation of 50% office based and 50% remote. At this point it was great to know that a lot of staff were ready to go and we had learnt on the way. The rest of the 50% were quickly deployed with the required equipment and updated instructions to guide them through the process of connecting.

Just a couple of days later, in line with Government guidelines, all workforce asked to work from home if possible.

Our capabilities had been stress tested, lessons learnt and within hours we had a fully operational remote workforce. Connections, Servers and the telephone system were working and staff, who had never worked at home before, received all the support they need to set up and work in their new environment.

As an advocate of cloud based telephony and remote working, having a whole team working remotely of each other, as opposed to a few members, brings its own challenges. Team meetings now take place via web and audio conference, contacts are easily connected on the same numbers as they always have been and IM keeps communication flowing."