Though the number of remote workers has increased by 140% since 2005, according to Owl Labs only 30% work remotely full-time. Many enterprises require employees to be shoulder to shoulder. In the wake of the Coronarius Virus outbreak (Covid-19) however, organizations are realizing the need for a disaster recovery plan that empowers remote workers.
With Covid-19 the CDC recommends isolation for at least fourteen (14) days even if mildly ill. Furthermore, if you’re not symptomatic, but you’ve had possible exposed to the virus you must still be placed in quarantine. The question then becomes what about work? How do organizations maintain productivity while keeping their employees safe? How do employees keep money in their pockets?
Some companies are now urging employees to work from home while some employees are erring on the side of caution and are choosing to work remotely. However, not everyone can do so. Unfortunately, many companies are ill equipped for remote work environments as workers cannot access the resources they need. With the push for face to face interactions and employees working from the office these environments were deemed unnecessary and dissolved. Now, organizations are scrambling to stand up their Desktop as a Service (DaaS) environments.
“COVID-19 is forcing all of us in IT to consider ways to allow our colleagues to work safely and securely from home and other remote settings. The smartest IT departments are using two important strategies: desktop as a service (DaaS) and zero trust networking with multi-factor authentication (MFA). While MFA has been around for a while and has been proven to work already, zero trust is just starting to be explored seriously. What’s been missing is large-scale DaaS deployments, but this latest health emergency might be the best time to deploy it. DaaS allows instant-on, disposable or long-running, secure remote desktops for multiple use cases. If management is asking colleagues to work from home but are not offering a DaaS-first teleworking option, then they’re risking their data and increasing cybersecurity risks. Unless you have zero trust networking perfected with 100% MFA in use across all remote settings, DaaS with MFA is probably your only safe and secure offering.” Shahid Shah, CEO of Netspective.
One thing that Covid-19 outbreak has highlighted is a gap in disaster preparedness plans. Often companies omit the people side of the disaster. As companies attempt to rectify this quickly, savvy businesses executives are looking to the Google Cloud Platform and itopia to implement DaaS environments quickly and securely. itopia empowers a secure, remote workforce and makes it faster and easier to deploy apps and desktops to the Cloud. In fact, remote workers can be up and running with itopia and Google Cloud within a day. This is crucial as every day we have new confirmed Covid-19 cases and the need for more quarantines.
itopia can help enterprises that need to implement their remote environments immediately and is currently waiving all implementation costs for qualifying use cases. Review the Covid-19 disaster preparedness plan and discover how you can activate a remote workforce securely and quickly within one day.
