Hi Adrian from Onsite Helper here, I just wanted to share with you a checklist of items you may want to consider should you decide or be forced to close the doors to your office and have your staff work remotely due to COVID-19. In fact, in the last week we have already had many requests from our clients on enabling a work from home environment. Let’s start with Email, the most used method of communication these days. – can staff access their emails from their mobile phones? If using Google Workspace you will want to install the Gmail app for best experience

File and folder Access

Ideally all your files are on the cloud and can easily be accessed anywhere from many devices. Like in Google Drive or Microsoft SharePoint. If your organisation has large amounts of data as many of our creative businesses do, often this data is stored locally at the office so getting a secure remote access connection could be a little tricky. We have set up secure remote access, which uses technology called Virtual private networks (VPN) that only allows your staff to access this data remotely. However, it may be a slow experience if your internet is not up to standard. With business NBN you can get the required bandwidth if needed.

Phone Calls

Does your phone system allow you to take your phone handsets and connect them at your employees homes? If your using VOIP then this should be possible. Your staff can do inbound and outbound calls just like they are in the office, your customers might not even know their working from home. You can also install a VOIP app onto mobile phones which could be even easier.

Meetings

As you want to avoid face to face meetings with your team and customers, virtual meetings are a great alternative. Google recently announced they are offering their enterprise level of hangouts meet to all Google Workspace clients till mid-year. This allows

• Meetings for up to 250 participants per call
• Live streaming for up to 100K viewers within the domain
• Record meetings to Google Drive
• In Fact that’s what this video was recorded in.

Computers/Laptops

Do you want your staff to use their personal home computer, would the personal computer comply with the organisations IT security requirements? Or would you need to supply them with a secure company laptop? If your business can operate from the cloud e.g all your data is in Google Workspace, office 365 and all your applications are cloud based, then Google Chromebooks are a perfect solution for this as they are much lower cost then Windows or Mac laptops and can be easily managed for their security and setup. In fact through our distributor we can ship new Chromebooks directly to your employees homes and they will be preconfigured with all the apps, bookmarked web pages and security so they can get working straight away.

Security

When employees are required to work remotely, often the security of your network may be more vulnerable to attacks. So it’s very important to make sure that all remote access is very secure and all your employees are using multifactor authentication when accessing their cloud apps. MFA is an additional security feature when a username and password is entered, you will need your mobile phone to prove that it’s really you trying to login. If your not sure on how your organisation would handle having all your employees working from home, give us a call for a free assessment and recommendations on what you can put in place now. 1300 889 839