Business Resilience In Tough Times

Global stay-at-home is a drastic measure and only solution to save life during a pandemic.  One of the Government’s first directives was to encourage IT sector to work from home, employing over 4.1 million in India alone. But were we prepared for this move? Very few of us can agree.
After weeks of lockdown about 80% of IT businesses moved to work from home. As this requires infrastructure support, processes and importantly employee mindset. As many may argue that their work depends on networks, servers, applications etc. To meet these challenges and to keep up with commitments made to our clients we would like to share a few proactive steps we took. And yes, this could not have been possible without our client’s active corporation and support.

Employee Safety – Nothing precedes over the safety and well being of our employees. We made immediate return travel of employees who were on international visits, including those in Italy, USA and other Europe regions well before the situation got out of hand. Self quarantine was made mandatory on their return, and also to those who showed minor cough/cold symptoms. 

High Availability – Preparedness to detect, react and recover from a disruption is our resilience strategy. We configured new servers, leveraged cloud and moved in-premise infrastructure to cloud to support client operations. This minimized our downtime and allowed our clients to have uninterrupted access to applications and software systems. We mapped and took immediate decisions to enhance our cloud IT environments. This effort led to infrastructure availability of 100% to enable continued business operations in less than 1 week. 

Continuous Operations – Organising computers and internet connections on short notice was set as a high priority. Our helpdesk team arranged and managed infrastructure support by providing VPN access and even as far as setting up work desktops at our employee’s home, including security and antivirus tools to ensure smooth operations with data security. All Business and Technical teams adopted google hangout and zoom meetings to communicate with clients and internal team members. 
There is more to business resilience than meets the eye. The advanced and hybrid adoption of cloud in the IT industry puts infrastructure Facilities, Application and Data Governance at the forefront of service offerings. Organisation structure, processes and strategy should fall in-line to address them. IT and software more than ever has become a substantial part of business functioning even for the smallest of the enterprises impacting our day-to-day lives. These tough times calls for tougher measures. Identifying business priorities, administering ability and quality of service to make necessary decisions is a prerequisite. IT industry holds a prominent position in being  cutting-edge, sustainable, and one of the most progressive sectors. It’s time once again to strive in such challenging times and enhance our own capabilities.