Keep Your Office Productive Even When Your Employees Are Stuck at Home!

This winter left the nation buried under snow and many businesses were effected because their employees physically couldn't get to work. However, inclement weather, disasters, and other disruptions do not have to negatively impact your productivity just because of these reasons.

Here are 5 Tips to Keeping Your Business Productive:

1. Virtual Private Networking (VPN)
Virtual Private Networking allows you to connect to your home PC to the company intranet as a secure node. VPN gives you access to Outlook, Citrix, and terminal servers and allows you to run certain applications remotely.

2. Active Remote Desktop Capabilities
Remote desktop applications such as LogMeIn deliver your work desktop to your home PC. It allows you to run programs and view files on that machine as if you were sitting right in front of your work PC. This solution is simple and secure and has several benefits. It provides remote access for employees who work in the field or travel frequently.
But what if your office loses power? You can't remotely log onto a machine that doesn't have electricity...

3. Offsite backup
When your office loses power, maintaining productivity depends on having access to critical files. As an alternative to installing an onsite generator, having an offsite backup of your files in place will give you access to your data even when the lights go out. Such a system allows you to access an archived copy of your files that's stored at an offsite location (normally a data center with its own generators and redundant Internet connections,) which you should have any way for purposes of data backups.

4. Emergency access to email
An email archiving system such as CMIT's RADAR (Rapid Archiving, Discovery and Recovery) has the additional ability to act as an emergency email system if your email server goes offline. An email archiving solution stores a copy of all emails and allows for fast searchability, and as an added bonus, the email going to the archive doesn't stop even if your email server loses power. Since many of us still depend on email, a searchable archive provides redundancy of this key communication tool in a cost-effective manner.

5. Implement an emergency texting service
In the case of a disaster like hurricane or flood, having an emergency texting service in place allows you to broadcast message to your employees even if no one has access to email. Cellular networks tend to stay online even when other infrastructures experience disruption, and mobile phones run on batteries, which makes this a solid solution for communicating during extreme weather conditions.

The key for all these tools, however, is having them in place and tested before disaster strikes.

These tools also provide your business with multiple benefits in terms of cost savings, improvements to efficiency, data security, and system monitoring that continue to provide substantial ROI even when the snow has long since melted.