Four Tips For Adapting Your Company’s IT To Telework

For the moment, the new lockdown decreed in mainland France spares Reunion Island. If this lockdown is extended to our island, will your company be able to maintain its operations at a sufficient level? This may be a good time to think about these questions and to consider implementing teleworking in your company, if you have not already done so. We offer you some advice on how to adapt your company’s IT to remote working.

1. Adopt Cloud Technology To Facilitate Teleworking

If adopted by a large portion of your workforce, remote working can put pressure on your IT infrastructure. This will be the case if your IT system is not adapted to a sudden increase in bandwidth demand. Your employees may face significant slowdowns in their applications. In some situations, your company will be exposed to the risk of a system crash.

Transferring all of your data and applications to a dematerialized system in the Cloud can solve this problem. More flexible than “on-premise” software, SaaS (Software-as-Service) applications better support peaks in their usage. Thanks to them, your employees who have a good internet connection will be able to work normally on their files from home whenever they want.

There are several criteria to consider when choosing your cloud. You might want to use a private cloud over a public cloud if security (or privacy) is a major constraint in your business. A hybrid system gives you the best of both worlds, but it can be more expensive and more complex to manage.

2. Improve Your Collaboration

Distance increases the need for communication between your teams. You will, therefore, need to equip yourself with tools to meet these new needs and maintain good relationships and the productivity of your employees.

In this context, collaborative applications such as Microsoft Teams stand out. Teams offer you a wide range of tools to facilitate communication in the office. In addition to telephony, chat, and videoconferencing, it allows you to collaborate on documents.

Natively integrating the essential applications of the Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) allows your employees to create, modify, and share documents on these applications in a completely fluid way. You will avoid going back and forth by email and the loss of important files.

SharePoint, another Microsoft Office application, is also very useful for teleworking. It offers a platform to store, manage and share your content and documents. With it, your employees can easily access their work files, regardless of where they are.

SharePoint is also perfectly compatible with many Microsoft 365 applications. Finally, it allows you to create an intranet on which you can manage your internal communications.

3. Equip Your Employees For Telework.

Provide laptops to your employees. This will prevent them from using their less secure personal equipment, with the risk of transmitting viruses to your computer network. You can also equip them with a VPN (Virtual private network) to protect the data they exchange with your company.

Also, encourage them to have a suitable workspace with an ergonomic chair.

4. Strengthen Your IT Security.

All businesses are at risk of cyberattacks, but remote working makes them more likely. You should, therefore, ensure that your entire IT system is sufficiently secured. This is to minimize these dangers as much as possible.

The weak link in any IT system is the human. That’s why it’s crucial to train your employees to warn them against risky practices and what to do if something goes wrong.