Lock-down and adjusting to the ‘home-office’

There’s no arguing 2020 has been a unusual year. We are living through what may be one of the most pivotal events in the last few generations. While it’s anyone’s guess what the long term impact of this virus will be, many of us will likely be transitioning to work remotely for the foreseeable future.

With large portions of staff working from home, on-prem IT infrastructure becomes a real bottleneck, with traffic that previously would have been switched within the LAN now having to be routed through the WAN. Most smaller companies are likely to just be running on a single gigabit gateway, without multiple paths for load balancing, and is likely to hit capacity with the operation of a simple VPN. Companies already using cloud-based servers will be counting their blessings, and I suspect many more will transition to such services over the coming months.

A key concern during this transition, however, is maintaining the security of company network when it’s distributed. It’s important that strict software firewall polices are maintained across the fleet of remote computers. Lets be honest even in the tech industry, many people are still going to using an out-the-box configured ISP router. These employee networks will have very loose security, routers that aren’t receiving security updates, with the potential for back-doors directly into their LAN.

Once adequate infrastructure is in place, I think most people are pleasantly surprised by how productive they are able to be from home. Provided corporate insurance policies accommodate the distribution of company property, I don’t see many reasons tech employees can’t work remotely under normal circumstances. Just the reduction in unnecessary travel has massive impacts on the financial and environmental cost of working, not to mention the time benefits for the employee.

It is going to be interesting to watch this play out, and see how these systems and processes evolve over the coming months and years. There are positives to take away from such a horrible event, and lets hope this opens employers eyes to new ways of running their companies. The featured picture is for me to reminisce on freedoms and experiences I took for granted in the past. Above all else, look after your families and stay safe during these uncertain times.