Hints and tips for working remotely during the COVID-19 outbreak
Monday, April 6, 2020
While there're many benefits to working remotely, there're also a lot of challenges that companies face, mostly because it’s the first time their employees are going remote.
Here are a few hints and tips that may help:
Keep communicating
Make sure your customers know how to reach you and their colleagues. Whether it’s email, Microsoft Teams, or any other channel, communicating with colleagues is essential, which is why remote meeting services are currently high in demand.
In response to the demand and to enable businesses to quickly and easily share documents, conduct team video calls and more, Microsoft is offering a Teams trial free for 6 months.
Stay secure
We’ve seen a significant increase in cybersecurity issues with cybercriminals exploiting the recent outbreak through phishing emails. By posing to be health, charity, education or government organisations, they’re emailing file downloads claiming to be advice or coronavirus statistics, asking for confidential information in exchange for health advice, and even linking to documents which harvest passwords.
Providing email security for Office 365, Vade Secure have introduced a new feature which cleverly tracks these pandemic email threats.
See how cyber-smart your customers are with our phishing quiz, and find out which areas may need your assistance.
Manage data
Most companies will use a virtual private network to keep information secure between the employee’s computer and their company’s IT system. A strain can be put on the server’s capacity as user licence demands increase to make sure everyone can cope working remotely.
To ease the pressure for these demands, we’ve funded a pledge; to provide free Cloud Server and VPN to all partners needing to support their customers who may be facing remote working challenges.
Backup everything
People often fall into the habit of saving things locally to their laptop rather than the company network, usually because there are issues with the VPN. Meaning if something goes wrong, it can be hard or impossible to recover.
By using the right backup tools they’ll be taking the right steps to recover valuable work, should they need to. To ensure you can protect your data as well as your customers’, we’ve extended our 3 Months Free Acronis Backup Offer into July.
Guarantee productivity
Staying productive while working remotely is easy with effective and efficient collaboration tools. To help businesses, Microsoft is currently offering Office 365 E1 free for 6 months. A great product to help employees work from home smoothly with web versions of Office applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Publisher
Watch our 'Introducing Collaborative Working' webinar recording to give you an overview of Teams, Microsoft 365 and Business Voice.
As a reminder, we currently have a number of free solutions to give your customers the ability to work remotely quickly and easily, including Teams, Office 365 E1, Cloud Server and Acronis.
We hope these solutions offer some comfort to you and your customers through this uncertain period. As always our team are here to help – 0333 332 0888.