Why work from home could be a general practice in coming months
There is no doubt that India is handling the Covid-19 outbreak much better than anyone had anticipated. One can argue that overall handling could have been much better, but one has to understand that this is a war-like situation and a seamless experience cannot be expected, that satisfies all segments.
There is no doubt that India is handling the Covid-19 outbreak much better than anyone had anticipated. One can argue that overall handling could have been much better, but one has to understand that this is a war-like situation and a seamless experience cannot be expected, that satisfies all segments.
The Corona Virus outbreak reached India, about two weeks after it had reached The US and Europe. However, the Indian Government moved swiftly towards a complete lockdown, giving the Business Continuity Plans (BCP) very less time to be executed.
The Challenges of Implementing Business Continuity Plans (BCP)
Covid 19 has posed be a unique crisis, and given the global impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, a traditional BCP is not sufficient enough. For instance, working from an alternate location ( region) is not possible. So with the social distancing norms and decongesting the workplace, the Work From Home (WFH) is the most suited option. Making 100% of the workforce operate from home (WFH) is in itself is a mammoth challenge. In terms of continuity of work, the challenges here are typically staying connected due to employees’ divergent Internet connections. So this needs to be managed in such a way that business goes on as usual and seamlessly.
Here is where the role of ISPs comes into play:
The role of ISPs
The seamless switchover to WFH by most of the companies would not be possible without reliable Internet connectivity. The ability of smartphones with great 4G connectivity in handy as well for those who did not have broadband at home during these critical times. All telecom service providers were able to live up to expectations and are continuing to provide good connectivity and there are no reports of any major disruption. This affordability along with reasonably decent reliability turned out to be a boon for most of the remote workers, demonstrating the agility with which the Indian IT sector can adapt and work.
WATCH Zee Business TV LIVE Streaming Online
Managing Compliance
The IT industry is driven by several compliance and regulations due to the global nature of the operations. The tight legal criteria of a few companies particularly in the Banking and Financial sector, mandates connectivity via a secured office network. But this challenge was overcome, by leveraging technologies like secured VPN and Remote Desktop.
Moreover, Cloud came in handy for many companies. For instance, news reports suggested that there is a significant increase in usage of MS Office 365 , Teams, Slack and other productivity applications. The complete concept of DevOps, Pipelines on Cloud deployment helped to access environment remotely.
Tech to Tide the Crisis
The global outbreak is yet to subside and cases are gradually rising in India but it is the reliance on technology and infrastructure that is giving organizations the confidence to think about how they can leverage learning from this in the coming months and also keep the workforce safe. The relatively uninterrupted IT services provided by India to the entire world demonstrates our agile BCP practices, technology thought leadership and delivery capabilities.
Key Learnings And Expectations In Near Future
In the next few months, most of the Indian IT workforce will be acclimatized to working in “distributed” mode, away from physical office limitations. This can also bring down the cost of development and increase the quality of development or support. Technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Serverless Architectures, DevOps will pick up like never before. There will be better and improved solutions coming in for logistics management, warranty management, ERP, and finance management aimed at making it more flexible and more compatible in working in distributed/disrupted environment.
The Indian IT workforce has got its debut experience of working from home, and in the next two months, we should see this generally accepted practice across most industries. This will reduce the cost of the workforce and will bring an experienced workforce in development and support across industries.
(By Gunendra Patil, CTO, Nihilent)
03:06 PM IST