Background
As the Coronavirus induced fear and crisis has engulfed the world as a whole, the Sri Lanka government imposed a nationwide curfew in March banning country’s 21.4 million people from leaving their homes and causing many businesses to close for good.
However, Sri Lanka’s nationwide curfew is proving to be tough for almost everyone including businesses. Business activities have been affected in the country in a big way due to a slew of restrictions imposed by the Sri Lankan government to contain the spread of the virus.
However, COVID -19 prompted a few changes as work from home became the new normal and also remote working solutions were considered as the only way to help businesses survive during this health crisis situation.
Business Scenario
Sajith, the Head of IT of ABC (Pvt) Ltd, is asked by the management to facilitate Work From Home (WFH) without spending too much (due to the crisis situation in-store) and ensuring the company data security is not compromised. Sajith had little idea on how to solve the problem. The person who has been always helping him to come out of such situations came to his mind.
He contacted the Dialog Account Manager who has been serving ABC for many years. As a result, Sajith could manage to get these problems solved one by one with the account manager and the solutions consultant. Finally, he arrived at a comprehensive set of WFH solutions meeting his management requirement. At the same time, he could do that while making his employees happy without persuading them to consume their personal data for office work.
Following shows how Sajith managed to come up with an ideal model to employ WFH solutions for the organizational benefit.
Problem 1: Sajith has some applications hosted in his Head office and some in Public cloud. He wants his employees to access these applications from home with the condition of security ensured.
Solution: Dialog proposed a remote VPN solution where customers can install the Application Delivery Controller in a virtual environment and remote users can access the applications via any internet connection available and connect to their corporate apps securely. In addition to the secure remote connectivity, Sajith got load balancing, WAF, traffic monitoring, two factor authentication etc. as additional features. This gave him confidence to open the corporate applications to public internet without a fear of getting hacked.
Problem 2: When Sajith asked the employees to use their own internet connections to access corporate applications they were resistant since they were already running out of broadband data since everyone is at home and always on internet.
Solution: Dialog had a solution for broadbands where Sajith can top up data from the company budget which can be used for company activities without consuming the personal data. This solution was convincing enough for employees to comfortably start working from home without worrying about internet usage.
Problem 3: If the company is paying for data how can Sajith justify the cost of data if the users utilize that data watching videos. Also if the users browse adult and violent content using the company data it will be a violation of the company IT policy.
Solution: Dialog will enable a separate SSID on the employees’ personal broadband connection and apply optional restrictions on social media, streaming services, adult content, and violence where Sajith has control over the traffic over the company-owned data. But using the same broadband device employee had the full freedom to browse any site using his personal data.
After half an hour call with Dialog team, Sajith managed to come up with a total solution for WFH with the following key points which the management was worried about,
- Low cost
- Securing the company data
- Giving the employees freedom to use their internet connection
- Not upsetting the employees
- Making sure the company productivity is maintained
Sajith presented his solution to the management and they were also very happy with Sajith’s quick turnaround with the perfect solution.