To date many medium to large companies have looked at Business Continuity and Resilience as a nice-to-have process over the other must-haves. Enter Covid-19 and every business is looking at measures to seamlessly serve their customers ensuring minimum downtime with no breach of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). With 70% of the workforce in many of these companies working remotely, Businesses lean heavily on IT infrastructure and services to keep their operations running and customers happy.
In the case of outbreaks like Covid-19, preventing people from entering their workplace leading to disruption of their ongoing operations, MSPs play a major role in helping the customer to continue their Business as Usual (BAU). As MSPs are already in the remote management business, social distancing will come easy. However, to many customers this would be a new concept. This thought piece looks at what MSPs like Emircom can offer customers in the current scenario as well as discusses opportunities that are up for grabs for MSPs post Covid-19.
Remote Digital Teamwork is the New Normal: Remote working has always seemed a second-best choice with customers, where most work is centered on the customer premises, while working from home is often seen as ‘slacking off’. It is only now that almost everyone is forced to work from home. Suddenly, WFH is the mainstream choice and all are learning to collaborate via video team calls.
Emircom can assist in determining and provisioning the most secure and appropriate solution to ensure continued access to key data and applications while minimizing additional risk.
? Managed Security Services (MSS): Security is always of the utmost concern when an environment is dramatically altered. As the workforce moves from the secure workplace to a home office environment, there may be limited or no security controls, policies or other typical safeguards in place. The attack surface grows exponentially, straining strategies and systems, and ultimately, increases company risk. MSS will assist in providing monitoring, management, auditing, and response services allowing organization and staff to focus on their business goals.
Emircom maintains its Network Operations Center (NOC) and 24×7 online staff availability in dispersed locations so that any region affected can be offset by another region (this process is used frequently for natural calamities like earthquakes, hurricanes, floods etc.). Further our infrastructure allows employees and engineers to work from home seamlessly.
? Productivity Savings: Remote Working greatly enhances Productivity Savings in terms of various aspects. This includes but not limited to Infrastructure space, utility bills, hardware maintenance (Desktops, Printers, Scanners, etc), locomotives, papers, logistics etc. With Managed Services Digital Transformation, adapting the below enables savings for organizations up to 30-40%.
o Social Apps like MS Teams, Cisco Webex
o Remote Tools like Citrix VDI, Azure Cloud (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS/, Private Cloud within UAE
o Managed Security Services
o Managed Cloud Contact Center Services
? Business Continuity: In lieu of the current COVID-19 situation, plenty of On-Prem Infrastructure organizations had to deal with instances like:
o Incurring additional expenditures towards arranging Laptops
o Incurring additional efforts towards enabling less secured Remote Access
o Arranging communications, FAQs, User Manuals as adaptation approach
Emircom, strongly recommends customers and organizations to embrace the new normal of Remote Working by re-modelling from Legacy scheme to enablement of Future outlook using below solutions:
o Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
o Platform as a service (PaaS)
o Software as a service (SaaS)
Process & Certifications: To be able to ensure uninterrupted communications, continual service delivery and Business as Usual, organizations must grip up on Processes to ensure seamless execution of administrative & technical activities.
Emircom offers Process as a Service (PraaS) which entitles all clienteles to benefit from a Centralized channel to have their respective Processes monitored and adhered. This ensures professionally developed templates, manuals, extensive documentations, FAQs, detailed reporting, Risk Assessment, Gap Analysis, Policies, Audit requirement preparations among other things.
Fundamentally, with the challenges that emerged due to Covid-19, businesses need to rethink what creates value, what is important right now and in the future. At best, the outbreak, will push MSPs to give rise to new, more Agile, more Resilient and automated & innovative ways of doing business that will allow companies to withstand a wide range of threats, both anticipated and unexpected, while still caring for their employees and their customers.
The fact remains that Organizations till date have had the readiness to face natural calamities and disasters which allowed them to ensure business continuity and insurance against destruction of equipment and premises. And now with the Coronavirus situation almost all businesses whether they are ready or not are being forced to provide Corporate issued laptops/mobile devices, secured Remote access to office networks and online collaboration tools along with processes to maintain business continuity.
Post Covid, the Organizations will continue to want to reap the cost savings they derived by introducing the remote working/ work from home model. It is here that MSPs need to rise to the occasion and emerge as true delivery partners to customers by equipping, advising and supporting them in going Digital. Slowly but steadily we are realizing that Business Continuity and Resilience is a must-have and MSPs are the key facilitators of the new normal.