We have an issue in Scotland at the moment called the Forth Road Bridge. You see the old girl is a bit sick so the government has had to close her until she gets repaired. The problem is 60,000 vehicles a day cross the bridge and now have to be diverted upsteam to the other two bridges which is causing chaos on the roads and a lot of unhappy commuters (myself included).
I am lucky though that I can do most of my work from home. A lot of other people could probably do the same if their employers thought about it a bit more and implemented the required measures. If you think about it you don’t actually need to implement a lot of measures to work from home.
So what do you need? The main two are:
Access to emails
Emails can be accessed from anywhere so long as you have an active internet connection.
Access to files
You have two main options here, either setup a VPN to your main server allowing secure access to all your files or migrate all your files to cloud storage. Using something like Onedrive for Business, Box, Google Drive, or Dropbox would accomplish this very easily but as always the size of your business would determine how scalable these options are.
You could go the whole hog and migrate to Office365 or Google Apps and have access to the complete package (ie emails and cloud storage). Yes these are monthly subscriptions (per user) but if you way up the monthly cost against lost productivity whilst commuting to work you may be surprised.
Now I know that for some people working from home is not a practical solution but for a lot of us it is so long as the required measures are put in place.
And the Forth Road Bridge? Please get the old girl fixed!!
About the Author
Hi I’m Chris Wakefield the owner of ComTech IT Support. I provide Cisco, Windows, OS X and Linux based IT Support to small businesses throughout Scotland.
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