Business in the Time of Pandemic: How CIOs Can Use Cloud Computing to Ensure Operational Stability and Business Continuity
What we are seeing in the world today is unprecedented. While businesses have always prepared themselves for Disaster Recovery and general business continuity, none of the past procedures have prepared us for a pandemic and the ensuing paranoia experienced simultaneously by nearly all countries in the world.
With many major enterprises already announcing they will miss their financial goals with dwindling supply chains (with most of the manufacturing heavily reliant on China), the stock markets have shaved off significant wealth and spiraling in the direction of an accelerated recession.
Amidst the chaos of the world markets, travel in any form grinding to a halt, enforcement of social distancing making millions of workers around the world working remote, the CIOs are left with an indomitable challenge of keeping systems running, ensuring continuity of business, delivering on their commitments to clients and safeguarding their technological investments. How can CIOs prepare themselves and their organization for this dramatic transition?
Cloud Virtual Desktops for the Remote Workforce
With majority of the workforce working remote from their respective homes, having a cloud-enabled virtual desktop is an indispensable solution. Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop is an app virtualization service that runs on the cloud. It can be utilized to setup multi-session Windows 10 environments which is also optimized for Office 365. Once apps are deployed to this virtual environment, maintenance, security patching and updates are auto-managed while your team can just focus on remoting in from their homes and working just as they would from their offices.
Hardware Procurement in the time of Pandemic
Most vendors in your hardware supply chain are likely reporting anything between significant delays to non-availability of resources to be able to start or complete your dependent projects on time. If you have an existing investment in Public or Hybrid Cloud, consider all your new workloads to be provisioned entirely out of your Cloud. Also, consider pre-allocating your cloud resources well ahead of time, as the cloud vendors temporarily running short of compute or storage availability may not entirely be out of question.
If you are running on-premise batch processes that need high compute but can be considered essential but less critical, you can provision Azure low priority VMs which are not only much cheaper than traditional VMs, but will also provide you an easily manageable alternative to on-premise workloads, especially in the days when your Batch operations personnel are working remote.
Invest in Cloud-based Remote Conferencing Abilities
You need to quickly consider your options if your current remote video conferencing and collaboration tools will sufficiently scale to cater the needs of an entire office working remote for a prolonged period of time. You would need to work out any contracts you may need with video conferencing and collaboration providers to ensure you have everything you need to keep your team productive.
Microsoft Teams, Azure Boards, Office 365, and Azure B2B Collaboration using Active Directory — are all some of the Azure based resources you may find useful.
Self-service Abilities for Line of Business Users and Clients
As you prepare for your teams to be working remote, it is imperative to consider that your support teams will also be working remote. Many standard L1 support functions which may be frequently received by the support teams may possibly be automated via self-service chatbots. Questions on similar lines as to “The document got stuck in the queue, can you please unlock it” or “Could you check what is the latest state of ID 1234” may be automated via simple chatbots.
Azure Cognitive Services offers LUIS and the Bot Framework — which working together, provide all the technology plumbing required to setup quick functional chatbots which can support your business users and play a complementary role to the L1 support teams.
Ensuring Audit Compliance and Regulatory Reporting
An entire workforce working and supporting remote would also mean an increased responsibility on the CIO to ensure adequate measures are taken for compliance to remote working regulations, system access and maintenance, future audit needs to assess any potential violations or breach of regulations to ensure auditors and regulators have everything they need to validate adherence during such times.
Azure has a suite of governance tools including the following, which can be leveraged to ensure ongoing compliance to regulations.
- Azure Monitor provides full observability into infrastructure and network
- Azure Policy for incorporating enterprise governance policies
- Azure Sentinel is a security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
As you put together your strategy to establish new standards of working, management and ensuring business continuity, make it a point that they are communicated to your teams clearly and unambiguously. These are uncertain times and while we take things forward one week at a time and revisit strategies and processes — it becomes vital that communication is clear, frequent and ensures all of your teams and your business partners concerns are addressed.
