COVID-19 homeworking for business: Quick guide

With the government publishing its coronavirus action plan earlier in March, and the more stringent measures that have come in since to enforce COVID-19 homeworking where possible, it’s quickly become vital for businesses to adopt homeworking arrangements for users. If your organisation isn’t familiar with this, it can be a daunting task, especially in a short space of time!

To help UK businesses prepare as effectively as possible , we’ve put together a short guide and a COVID-19 resources page that outlines some key points for adopting temporary homeworking – and making it work for your business and users.

Our experience

We’ve done this based on over 10 years experience helping our customers with remote workforces working in a secure, productive and efficient manner. So we’ve summarised some of the main IT considerations for COVID-19 homeworking into a simple checklist – addressing these before (or very quickly after) homeworking starts will ensure all parties are happy and comfortable with the new working arrangements, and ensures that business can function as smoothly as possible during the COVID-19 crisis.

COVID-19 homeworking checklist

  • Do your users have the right hardware for working remotely – high spec laptop, mobile, comfortable workstation, printer, etc?
  • How will you and your team collaborate for group meetings, workshops, customer demos, etc? Should you consider collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams? This means you can get together for formal meetings, but also have daily coffee breaks in front of your screens to catch up more informally
  • Can confidentiality and compliance with data protection regulations be satisfied from a homeworking environment?
  • Don’t forget to update email signatures with mobile numbers instead of office landlines if they will go unanswered while the office is closed (IT can do this centrally across all signatures in Outlook)
  • Are users able to work at home securely with access to servers, VPN, etc?
  • Have you provided the right file sharing, collaboration and filing tools such as SharePoint and OneDrive

Further guidance about work duties and how to support your homeworkers with tasks, breaks, regulations and so on can be found here.

Find out more

Complete IT Systems Ltd have been providing these services to our customers for over 10 years and have many satisfied clients. For more information on how we can help, please call us on 01274 396 213 or read more about our support services here.

Printers & consumables for home workers during the COVID-19 crisis

Home office

Whether you’re looking for a quick solution for printers for homeworking during COVID-19 crisis, or you’re looking to deploy a more strategic print refresh, Complete IT Systems provide full range and expertise on printers and consumables.

We offer competitive prices, expertise on many lines of printers, inks and toners from all the major brands, in addition re-manufactured and compatible cartridges to fit all budgets and requirements – most lines are stocked and available on a next-day business delivery service.

From small desk based ink jet systems up to the high end departmental multi-function lasers, we have your requirements covered.

Find out more

Complete IT Systems Ltd have been providing these services to our customers for over 10 years and have many satisfied clients. For more information on how we can help, please call us on 01274 396 213 or read more about the print and consumables brands we carry here.

More guidance for businesses trying to quickly setup to enable homeworking is available here, and we’ll be publishing many more tips and guidance over the coming days and weeks.

Enable remote work while securing data during the COVID-19 pandemic

During this crisis, many office-based employees have become remote workers, and especially so now that confinement restrictions are in place across the UK.

As well as bringing up challenges for users such as how to juggle children, meals, and work and home life, remote working brings new security risks and productivity challenges for IT departments.

Over the coming days and weeks the team at Complete IT Systems will be publishing a series of guidance and tips to help you through this situation. In our first article, we focus on how Barracuda can help secure your data and infrastructure while ensuring reliable connections to maintain employee productivity.

How to secure your remote users in 3 easy steps:

  1. Reliable remote connectivity – Provide remote users with VPN access from any device with better performance than traditional IPsec-based VPNs.
  2. Zero touch provisioning – Centrally manage large deployments with minimal IT resources. Users can download and access apps without elevated privileges on their device.
  3. Support – The team at Complete IT Systems are committed to helping you in this challenging time by being a full partner in your business security. Find out about our support options for Barracuda and other solutions here.

Whitepaper: Advanced Secure Access for Remote and Mobile Workers

Barracuda CloudGen Firewalls incorporate advanced client-to-site VPN capabilities to ensure remote employees secure access to the network. Read more about how in this whitepaper.

How can I find out more?

As Barracuda Partners, Complete IT Systems can offer you expert advice on the solutions and how they could be effectively deployed in your business.

To find out more please call us on 01274 396 213 or use our contact form and we’ll arrange a good time to call you back.