Teneo Advises Organizations To Test Networks For Mass Home Working In Preparation For Swine Flu Epidemic

Published on: 21 July 2009

Teneo, a leading infrastructure optimisation specialist, is advising all organisations who are planning to allow the majority of their workforce to work from home if Swine Flu affects their employees to thoroughly test if their network infrastructure can cope with mass home working.

With the World Health Organisation upgrading the influenza pandemic alert on 11th June from phase five to its highest level at phase six, businesses and organisations are now reviewing their swine flu pandemic preparedness. For organisations who have office based employees, many are now finalising contingency plans which rely heavily on home working.

Global companies who have offices in some of the most affected areas such as Mexico, USA and Australia are already implementing home working policies – for example, Microsoft’s 400 employees in Mexico are working remotely. Dell, IBM and General Electric have discussed emergency plans to enable their entire workforce to work remotely to prevent the spread of disease amongst employees.

Teneo is advising all organisations that are planning to significantly increase home working to first ensure their network infrastructure can cope and to investigate solutions that will use valuable bandwidth more effectively. Teneo can help businesses by simulating the effect on an organisations’ network when the majority of employees log in remotely. For most employees logging in, they will typically experience file download speeds 10-20 times slower than at the office which will inevitably impact staff productivity.

Teneo is working with a wide range of organisations to install Riverbed Wide Area Network (WAN) optimisation appliances which can radically reduce the amount of WAN data traffic. Using Riverbed Steelhead appliances, outlying branch offices can experience Local Area Network (LAN)-like performance over the WAN, reducing data traffic by up to 60-95%. For remote workers, solutions such as Riverbed Mobile can enable employees to enjoy fast access to an organisations’ key application packages, with file downloads four times faster than normally possible.

Preparing for potential events such as the swine flu epidemic is causing strain for companies already struggling with shrinking capital expenditure budgets as a result of the economic downturn. For some organisations, special disaster recovery budgets may prove a source for funds. To help with the situation, Teneo can supply a solution on a managed or a leased basis.

James Hall, marketing director, Teneo, commented:
“With the WHO upgrading the pandemic alert to phase six, many organisations are putting together emergency plans. Our advice for organisations that are planning to allow most employees to work from home is to ensure your network infrastructure can cope and then do all you can to ensure employees will be able to work productively on your organisations’ key applications. Working with Riverbed we have solutions that can be quickly rolled out and will dramatically improve network performance. In a pandemic situation this investment could be repaid in days and productivity levels can be assured.”