When COVID-19 resulted in an immediate shutdown with virtually no warning, every one of our clients needed to set employees up to work from home.

In some cases, that meant 10 or 20% of the staff needed remote access. In other cases, 100% of the team went from working in the office to immediately working from home..

That meant more than just disruption for the employees. While we were required to minimize travel, we had to work fast to move 100's of employees in a short amount of time.

How can you pivot on a moment's notice and still get the job done quickly and smoothly?

We started much earlier than the actual event by "expecting the unexpected." While we didn't specifically anticipate the pandemic, we had planned ahead for disasters and anticipated the need to support emergency "work from home" scenarios.

The keys to a smooth process were advance planning, project management, natural sense of urgency and rapid response.

We had:
1. Assigned a primary Ferox team member for each client to manage the process.
2. Included "limited access to physical offices" in our disaster recovery plans.
3. Built a secure infrastructure that allowed remote or cloud access to all vital services.
4. Provided Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services where it made sense.
5. Moved to a "mostly laptops" infrastructure as part of our "work from anywhere" philosophy. We also ordered new laptops from multiple suppliers and deployed them as needed.
6. Installed remote support software on all systems.
7. Set up security tools such as antivirus and firewalls to work from any network.
8. Set up monitoring and alerting on critical services.
9. Tracked assets so that we knew what equipment was deployed with whom.
10. Adjusted and increased licensing to ensure compliance during the event.
11. Provided important team communications tools such as email, groups, video conferencing, integrated phone systems, and mobile phones.

People started working from home within hours of the decision to send people home. Most clients were up and running the same or next business day.

Ferox was a huge help when we decided to send people home to work during the pandemic. The transition was smooth and easy with their help.

We didn't skip a beat.