It’s no secret that IT organizations can be challenged to scale resources to ensure that employees have secure and reliable access to the systems and applications they need to do their jobs. So what do you do when natural disasters or public health emergencies such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic occur?

As we’re seeing, such events impact people and communities on a global scale. Moreover, they demand drastically new ways of thinking and operating — particularly in the way we work — and require companies to quickly put in place flexible business models and workplace technologies to support strategic functions and infrastructure to ensure the safety of employees while maintaining continuity. And IT has to deliver.

A Delicate Balancing Act

It’s not an easy task: enable employees to work from the safety of their homes using the applications and devices of their choice without sacrificing the security of corporate systems and data. But in the face of COVID-19-inspired quarantines and calls for remote work, it must be done quickly and efficiently.

Thankfully, the technology exists today to make remote work possible. When disasters strike that prevent employees from physically getting to an office for an extended period of time, tools like digital workspaces, dynamic application control and delivery management, and collaboration technologies allow them to connect and get work done from wherever they are in a secure and reliable manner.

Taking Action

When COVID-19 surfaced in China, we at Citrix were prepared to quickly get our customer support teams up and running remote. Our IT organization started by thinking about the critical three Cs: connectivity, communication and collaboration.

  • Connectivity: We leveraged Citrix SD-WAN to manage the quality of service and bandwidth burst in a dynamic way. We tapped our application delivery control (ADC) solutions to allocate our resources to our applications in a dynamic fashion. And we managed all our ADC from the cloud using our central application delivery management controller, which enabled us to make swift decisions. As a hybrid company, our virtual infrastructure for end-user compute and application resources is spread across the data centers we have around the world and in the cloud. However, the control plane for all resources is managed from Citrix Cloud, which enables us to scale resources in the cloud if required in a matter of seconds. And this is exactly what we did when COVID-19 hit.
  • Communication: Maintaining communication with our customers and ensuring there is no disruption to their operation was our top priority. Once reliable connectivity was in place, we leveraged our software-defined VOIP infrastructure to route calls seamlessly to the support agents in their remote locations with zero disruption to customers.
  • Collaboration: On the collaboration side of things, we took aggressive measures to ensure our support operations were fully equipped to provide the same levels of service our customers have come to expect. We leveraged platforms like Slack, Skype, and GoToMeeting to provide richer chat/video connectivity outside of traditional voice calls alongside Citrix Files as a key content collaboration platform to aggregate the content sources our team needs to do their best work.

Beyond Technology for Success

We knew the technology would work. But every CIO knows change is not just about technology, it’s about people, process and technology. Working remote would be a huge change for employees affected and would require them to think and operate in completely different ways. Before enacting the policy, we collaborated closely with our HR peers to provide the context for the change along with resources to help them make the adjustment. We decided to lean in and take a walk in the user’s shoes and collect feedback along every step of their journey that could be used to deliver a superior experience that would enable them to perform at their best.

Maintaining Continuity

Within 24 hours of enacting our work-from-home policy in China and Japan, we had all employees up and running. And we have seen no declines in their productivity or our service levels. In fact, we have actually seen improvements. Our average speed of answer prior to enabling remote work, for instance, was on average 2.5 minutes. Today, it is less than a minute.

When we had to extend remote work to our global population, we put our employee productivity and experience on top. And the experience we gained from China and Japan came in handy. As a proactive measure in tight partnership with HR and Facilities, we initiated a rolling test of our remote work capabilities to larger sites to ensure we could scale up if we needed. When the time came, we were able to shift the entire company to work remote in less than 24 hours.

The Future of Work

Going through an experience such as the mass work-from-home shift as a result of COVID-19 is opening up the aperture for technology and business leaders about remote working and the future of work. Not only is it a good business continuity measure, but also a strategic tool for attracting the right talent and activating untapped workforces across the globe in the long term.

Smart IT organizations recognize this and are placing technologies like digital workspaces at the core of their business continuity plans, to help manage resources in a dynamic and scalable way that global business environments demand.