Five IT Business Considerations for the COVID-19 Outbreak

The COVID-19 (or Coronavirus) outbreak has created an unprecedented global event with implications far beyond healthcare. It’s fundamentally changing how organizations run their business and IT operations. U.S. citizen travel has been banned to multiple countries, global businesses such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have instituted work from home policies, universities and schools across the nation have temporarily closed their doors, and large group gatherings have been cancelled, thereby limiting events and conferences to online-only experiences. All of this amplifies stress on IT professionals to keep organizations and employees up and running, securely. IT pros will be driven to respond to rapidly changing conditions, including:

1. Capacity and Performance – The need for and reliance on collaboration systems such as Cisco^® Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom will be emphasized, resulting in a potential system capacity and performance overload and greater need to monitor performance and availability.
2. Security – Newly remote employees may not have the right security protection and will need IT pro assistance installing VPNs, updating patches, and obtaining access rights. A high volume of remote employees can test firewalls and saturate VPNs, causing performance and availability issues or an open threat vector. If VPNs are bypassed, bad actors will take advantage, challenging organizations to filter the signal from the noise.
3. Application Access – Access to critical apps whether they’re on-premises or in the cloud changes in nature due to a higher volume of remote workers. Monitoring application, infrastructure, and network performance, and then quickly troubleshooting problems cannot rely on historical baselining. The complexity of keeping services up and running is magnified when time is of the essence.
4. IT Support – Remote workers will undoubtedly need more support, which can overwhelm the service desk and tech pros and increase wait and resolution times for organizations without a remote access solution.
5. Business Continuity – Plans will be tested on a global stage forcing tech pros to find and fill gaps quickly.

SolarWinds Responds With Tools to Monitor, Manage, and Secure IT Environments Remotely SolarWinds understands the unexpected challenges IT pros face due to the COVID-19 outbreak. To help the IT pro community quickly respond to the needs of their end users, we’re extending free trials of Dameware^® Remote Everywhere (DRE), our cloud-based remote support software, for 90 days to organizations affected. DRE will allow your IT team to connect to remote workers and provide them with support designed to be secure. The software is fully functional and will provide trial licenses for up to four technicians, serving up to 2,000 endpoints. If you are affected, please click here to activate a free trial. Moving Forward Together We will continue look for ways in which SolarWinds can help organizations face these challenges, whether through additional free offerings, sharing best practices with the products you already own, or through the continued engagement of our THWACK community of over 150,000 members worldwide, who are creatively problem-solving together. I encourage you to visit THWACK to learn more.