However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
Winston Churchill
You would have to be hiding under a rock to not hear someone talking about the current Coronavirus pandemic and how it is affecting the world today. While the vast majority of the population remains healthy and unharmed, the impact this tiny little bug is having is touching on every human being on the planet. With all the hype and noise, what do we in the IT field need to be concerned about?
The unfortunate fact is that the virus is impacting a great many things. China is producing most of what the world is buying from a consumer point of view. Many companies are facing large gaps in their supply chain greatly limiting their ability to fulfil orders. The Stock market is a roller coaster of mostly down days. Large organizations like the NBA and NCAA are making drastic changes to their schedules or even cancelling them outright. Several conferences have cancelled last minute. Every one of these impacts the economy.
But it doesn’t stop there. Here in my new home town of Chattanooga they have extended the Spring Break to two full weeks. One of the colleges just ended the semester. How do parents continue working with the kids off an extra week? If the virus does spread, how do your workers get their jobs done and stay safe?
This is where you find out if you have a Business Continuity Plan or a Strategy. If you have not tested your Business Continuity plan, then you only have a strategy. Now is truly not the time you want to find out which of these your company has.
You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out
Warren Buffett
It is important to understand the difference between a Disaster Recovery plan and a Business Continuity plan. The main difference between the two is business continuity requires that you keep operations functional during the event and immediately after. Disaster recovery focuses on how you respond after the event has completed, and how you return to normal. When something like a fire, flooding, building falls down, etc. disaster recovery is the main concern. When you have a pandemic or a long term disaster, business continuity could mean the difference between your company surviving the event or not. How long could your company survive if your workers were not able to come to work? What kind of contingencies do you have in place?
For many, plans for how to deal with this problem have been in place and tested thoroughly before the first person came down with the virus. Many others can possibly “weather the storm” by merely hunkering down and riding it out. In this day and age though, the fact is if you are not prepared, it may cost you more than you can afford. What can be done now to keep our team members able to work?
There are several solutions that permit the sharing of desktop resources without having to be at the desktop. Software like LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, etc. can be used to connect an individual to their desktop at work using a cloud based service. Unfortunately, these can be difficult to setup, can require hands on each workstation to connect it to the correct account, and are inherently less secure than most companies can tolerate.
Traditional VDI solutions from Citrix or VMware are easy places to turn, but unless you already have them configured and have the hardware to run the resources many companies will find them challenging to setup last minute like we are now.
Both of the aforementioned companies do offer the ability to connect the actual physical desktop the employee or team member would normally use every day. This option seems to be very attractive as it merely requires an agent on the computer. Cloud management planes can make the deployment of this environment even easier, thus permitting companies the ability to rapidly deploy this option without a long deployment period normally required for VDI, since it is PDI or Physical Desktop Infrastructure. Both companies refer to it as RemotePC
There are also cloud based options now. Azure has the Windows Virtual Desktop and Citrix offers the Citrix Managed Desktop to complement this offering. AWS offers Amazon Workspaces and there are others. The problem with these options is getting them connected to your data assuming it is still in your data center. And getting the dedicated resources and connections may prove challenging as you will probably run in to a lot of companies trying to do the same thing. One very promising Cloud option I was introduced to recently is Tehama. They can spin up a workspace full of workstations, connect it to your network, monitor what everyone is doing inside the workspace, and spin it down once everything returns to normal.
Once the dust settles and the fog clears, we can dig in more depth how to create your Business Continuity plan. But you truly need to have a plan in place before this occurs.
Make ‘business continuity’ ‘business as usual’ and embed it into your management routines as decisions are made, instead of an afterthought check off the box exercise later.
Bobbie Garrett
The most successful plans I have seen have been the companies that operate off of one data center for half the year and the other one for the other half. Then, they know that they can lose one without an issue.
