The outbreak of Novel Coronavirus has impacted the World in several ways. As of March 19, 2020, 2 lakhs+ cases have been reported to WHO and more than 8000 people have lost their lives worldwide. This biological disaster has also hurt severely the economy of many countries and organizations.

To contain the hazard countries have set down stringent actions and protocols in place.

Governments and businesses have also to ensure that services are continued while ensuring safety of employees. A major step taken by businesses was to provide option and facilities to “Work from Home” to employees.

The world is in panic situation as COVID 19 disperses and every business has been forced to work remotely. And it surely be the first time that employees had to work from home which can bring the own set of disputes.

Working 9 to10 hrs. a day from your dining table or bedroom is the toughest job as per the management and there are ample of concerns like data security, IT Infrastructure issues, operational issues etc.

To overcome such issues Softenger will feature BCP plan focused on working remotely and to provide uninterrupted business services to its clients.

Setting up your workforce remotely, especially when it is unplanned, can feel like challenging and distinct job.

The crucial recommendation for all businesses is to create or adopt a business continuity plan because it’s important to decide what should happen in the short to medium term and longer-term impact, as we can’t predict how long the virus will be around us ad made its impact.

A continuity plan should include measures to prevent infections in the workplace, such as encouraging all employees to work remotely and maintain their health, hygiene etc.

BCP should consider increasing numbers who can work remotely. Considering security risks and operational issues, developing the infrastructure to make your IT systems remotely handy.

If your business does not have facilities for remote working, assess whether developing facilities would be justified. Remote working can provide virtual presence of essential staff and continuation of critical services.

BCP plan is a disaster recovery plan and key components of continuity plan which comprises strategies for handling IT disruptions to networks, servers, personal computers, laptops and mobile devices. The business continuity plan should cover how to restore the office productivity and enterprise software so that major business goals and needs should meet.

IT infrastructure of an organization consists of physical, virtual or cloud infrastructure. It has many components like Databases, Storages, Networks, Middleware, Critical Business Applications, Messaging Solutions, etc. Accessing these components remotely needs a concrete Business Continuity Plan.

We recommend looking at the remote data center management and cloud options for critical systems. We also help to enable remote working programs and explore alternate voice and chat options. We also reschedule nonessential IT work and prioritize key applications.

Following are the considerations which provide the remote access of IT Infrastructure

1. Validation of roles and responsibilities, recovery requirements and emergency preparedness exercise, such as a work-from-home drill or a table simulation that operates on a time scale.

2. Identify any gaps in recovery capability and resource needs.

3. Assess whether team members can cope with their responsibilities and promote collaboration between them.

4. Then get feedback from the crisis management team.

5. When you are going to setup the remote model, the virtual communication and collaboration plays a vital role to avoid human contacts.

To make it effective we need to acquire following techniques for effective communication which would be key success to BCP:

• • All team members should have high speed internet access
  • VPN access has been set up and accessibly tested
  • Team can access the tools, database effectively
  • Video Conferencing etc.

6. Using above tools ad technologies would be helpful to avoid human contact under the pandemic situation.

7. Meetings can be done over Skype, Google Hangouts and while real time collaborations it can be done using free platforms like Collab edits.

8. To manage the stakeholder’s expectations, when team are working remotely it is essential to maintain trust and confidence which helps to build and grow the strong relationships for effective remote work.

9. Automating activities like Remote Shutdown of Computers, Log Monitoring, Migration to cloud, etc.

• Businesses can identify core services, ensure smooth IT operations and have controlled access to infrastructure remotely.
• Better identification of risk & risk management.
• Managing audit, regulatory and reporting compliance.
• Develop a communication strategy to avoid physical contacts and
  Health Protection of employees.