When did you last review your business IT? 

The continuing events surrounding COVID-19 and the responses worldwide have been numerous and varied, but one thing has been evident everywhere; there was a large scale lack of preparation for this situation, and much of it was in the realm of business IT. 

Many businesses simply shut down overnight, as there was no way for people to do their jobs from home. Many workers simply had no equipment, or (even worse in the eyes of many IT professionals) used personal equipment, to perform vital work tasks. This left a great many businesses non-compliant on GDPR regulations, as well as facing operational and financial difficulties. Some could not deliver their services to customers until they had delivered a physical fleet of machines or set up methods to bring their internal systems to the cloud, or allow them to be shared remotely. 

But it’s all sorted now, right? 

 There are a great many businesses across the UK, and the world, that have been playing catch-up since the outbreak of COVID-19, and many are still struggling. This rather poignantly demonstrates just how important it is to regularly review your IT strategy, and ask whether it continues to accurately reflect the strategy of your business. Recent legislation and guidelines around device sharing and hot-desking in light of the UK response to coronavirus has meant that many businesses have had to radically change the way they distribute hardware and working areas to their staff, with entire offices simply out of action if they are unable to meet new health and safety guidelines brought in after the pandemic. 

Currently it’s vital to make sure that if there is any way you can keep employees distanced, then you should. Ideally, if they can undertake all their work from home, then this is the best action to take. If your staff members access shared resources on a server that is ‘On-Premises’ then access to these files and resources can be pushed over the internet. If you’re closing offices or no longer sharing a central workspace, then you can also migrate a server from a physical machine to a ‘VM’ or Virtual Machine in the Microsoft Azure platform, removing the need for a machine entirely.  

If your server runs your domain, and you use Microsoft Office 365, Windows 10 Pro and Office 365 can be configured to run your domain user accounts anywhere through Azure Active Directory, giving you an easy to administer, centralised control point for all of your machines and user accounts. Server files can be migrated to SharePoint, for ease of access and control, and anywhere-availability. 

What about supporting my workers?  

Azure Active Directory works with Office 365 to ensure that you just need a single sign-on for  your Office apps, as well as to log into your Windows 10 Pro machine, so a single password reset via your IT department or Managed Service Provider ensures you have access to everything, or that access to everything can be denied, at the click of a mouse. 

Microsoft Teams is another revolutionary part of Office 365, and can be used as a central hub not only for your chat and file-sharing functions, but also all your favourite project management and productivity apps. It can also integrate with certain VoIP services, meaning that you can have all of your chat, files, phone-calls and meetings in Teams, and you don’t need any hardware other than the machine that it’s installed on. No phones, no hot desks, no need for the office = no COVID risk. 

All this functionality is great, but it still needs to be secured, and if you still aren’t using a modern business antivirus suite like Bitdefender, then it really is time to get licenced and get everything protected to the same standard. That’s only the first stage of protecting yourself of course, there’s email filtering to keep the attachment-nasties at bay, and now you can even backup all of your Office 365 data to ensure that you have protection against ransomware, as well as have the ability to restore and fix potentially expensive mistakes, like losing files or deleting documents. 

Crikey. Is that all? 

This all sounds like a lot to take in, but in reality, these services represent the minimum investments for running a business that takes protecting its productivity seriously. If you aren’t looking into migrating to some or all of the types of service mentioned here, then you should be. Fortunately, many Managed Service Providers now have a very mature approach to migration and wholesale change of services, and can consult on building a better strategy to support workers remotely, and optimise your business to take advantage of the best parts of the ‘new normal’.  

If you need an experienced team to assess your IT strategy, or you’re looking for a service provider that is able to supply all the above services and more, then get in touch with Pearce IT today.