Launching a fully remote workforce in five days
In 2020, Covid-19 changed our daily routines. Businesses, schools and government offices responded in a variety of ways. Around the world, people have been asked to practice social distancing. Many are working from home, connecting to their offices via a secure link, most often a VPN.
If their organization’s network infrastructure isn’t built for dozens, hundreds or thousands of team members connecting via VPN, the result will be slow response times, glitchy calls and video, dropped remote desktop sessions, frustration and loss of productivity. The good news is, infrastructure can be updated quickly to accommodate the additional strain.
Rapidly Launching a Remote Workforce
One of Ecessa’s impacted clients is a market research firm that maintains call centers in multiple locations. Their 500 agents normally work in cubicle configurations using standard desktops and traditional phones to call consumers
to conduct surveys. That density of personnel doesn’t support efforts to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus.
To keep its workers safe and comply with pandemic guidelines, the firm arranged to have its agents work from home. The firm supplied its team with Chromebooks with built in VPN clients. Agents now use softphones (VoIP) to connect to the office. They access their survey applications through their secure connections.
To handle the increase in bandwidth demand these VPN sessions generate, the firm quickly acquired a secondary Internet connection from a local broadband provider. The firm installed an Ecessa device to be the termination point for their VPN clients, to load balance that VPN traffic between the two circuits, and to provide automated inbound redundancy for the agents with Ecessa’s Authoritative DNS functionality. This ensures they will have enough throughput to power their remote workforce and continuous connectivity if service from one of the providers is disrupted.
White Glove Service and a Sense of Urgency
The fast action taken by the firm’s IT professionals meant that in less than one week, they were able to upgrade their infrastructure to support the shift to remote work. They purchased their Ecessa unit on a Friday; the following Monday, Ecessa engineers provided guided deployment support for immediate installation. Together, they made the necessary DNS configuration changes on Tuesday. The firm was ready to connect its remote workforce on Chromebooks by Wednesday.
The firm took a daunting challenge – convert 500 agents from centralized offices to virtual, remote offices – and successfully adapted its practices and infrastructure to ensure business continuity.
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