We are now officially in what is being called the second wave of Covid-19. The reality is that these waves so far are smaller than prior pandemics, in most part to the fast-moving responses of governments and businesses in Canada. The impact when these waves hit can be tremendous though due to these responses (shutdowns, social distancing orders, capacity limitations, localized isolations, etc.). Unlike a gentle wave, these effects are more like riptides and if you are not prepared for it, they will pull your business under.

With the numbers rising again, and new response measures in place, employers are continuing to embrace work from home arrangements. Some smaller companies have returned to the office, and a few have a date set in mind for a potential return, but many want to keep the work from home regime alive and are in no rush to have their employers return to the office, especially with all the remaining uncertainty.

We are going to have to prepare for at least some or all our offices to be in lockdown over the next year. As waves of the pandemic come through your staff may have to self isolate because one of their kids encountered another kid at their school. They may have come into the office and had contact with other staff members. Your local community may be shifted back to a Stage 2 or Stage 1 lockdown to prevent community spread of the virus.

The key to remember is that you will have no control over this, and neither will your staff.

Collaboration tools have moved from “nice to have” to MUST haves, and you must have the right tools for your organization - not just what may be conveniently available at the time. What tools can allow your team to work as seamlessly as they would in the office? Can GoToMeeting sufficiently replace in person meetings? If you need to host a larger event, will you invest in GoToWebinar? Are Jive phone systems, and Microsoft Teams the right tools to allow continuous communication throughout your organization? If so, you need to ensure your team, and organization is equipped with these tools from the comfort of their own home offices.

Having your entire team working from home, or potentially “anywhere” can propose some problems. The biggest problem being security, which is closely followed by bandwidth. With your team working away from the office, your organization is going to have more files moving across the network. This is going to cause a slower and more painful user experience, and because of these users are going to begin taking shortcuts that could potentially compromise security. Creating a Virtual Desktop may be one of the most important things you do for your employees and your organization. Your team will have access to your organization's network so they can safely access and share documents with one another in a protected environment no matter where they are working from.

Lastly, since this pandemic has gone on for much longer than anyone had initially anticipated it is crucial to ensure your team is comfortable in their home-office. Providing your employees with the right tools such as laptops, webcams, printers, phones, and headsets could make all the difference within their day to day duties and allow the work from home experience to not feel so far away from the reality of working in office.

TIG has a team of experts who can help you put together a unique plan for your organization. We will work with you to learn more about your organization, what your goals and needs are, if they have changed, and deliver a full rounded package of products and services that will have you and your team prepared for long-term success.

Cloud computing is often cited as a way for SMBs to save money. Smaller business, which typically don’t have the resources necessary to maintain their own in-house computing infrastructures are often seduced by the convenience and flexibility of public cloud services. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine (GCE) are the Big Three in this area, and millions of businesses rely on them every day.

Unfortunately, with most of the public cloud services come a whole raft of hidden costs, and it’s not always easy to take back control. After all, since the service providers want to discourage customers from getting out, there’s usually something of a vendor lock-in in the form of data egress fees. Data egress refers to outgoing data which, in this case, is data being migrated from one cloud service to another, an on-premises device or to another region operated under the same service provider.

Unsurprisingly, uploading data to the cloud (data ingress) is usually free. However, when companies want to move anything out of the cloud, they’ll typically be charged data egress fees. Fees are charged on a per-gigabyte basis, with multiple fee brackets meaning that cost per gigabyte is reduced once you reach larger data loads. Nonetheless, the costs can still run into thousands of dollars per month, which can be crippling for any small business that relies heavily on data.

Colocation Services Improve Speed and Reliability

One of the main obstacles to using major cloud provider services is that most do not offer colocation services. Colocation is the ability to integrate client-owned assets and data with the existing cloud infrastructure – essentially keeping the most business-critical data elements at arm's reach.

Neither Amazon nor Microsoft allow for colocation services, so data uploaded on their cloud networks may end up residing in servers very far from the workstation handling the data. As physical distance increases, so does loading time and connection unreliability. The inability to have client-owned (or third-party) assets reside on their cloud networks is a serious disadvantage in terms of speed and cloud dependability. For enterprises that already own and operate their own data centers, colocation is the heart of the hybrid cloud strategy. For businesses just entering the field, local third-party colocation service providers can make space for clients on their infrastructure, ensuring that the most often-used data is available locally.

Enterprises are moving their mission-critical deployments to colocation servers for two primary reasons:

• Data Center Design Improvements: New advances in data center design have made outsourced colocation more cost-effective than building a dedicated data center. Colocation providers can offer power, space, and cooling at prices that individual companies cannot match.
• Increased Computing Demands: Virtualization and the continuing drive to handle ever-greater workloads puts a strain on purpose-built data centers. Retrofitting an older facility is far more expensive from a Total Cost of Ownership perspective than using colocation services – even in the long-term.

This is an enormous advantage for companies that need to make large amounts of data immediately accessible in different physical locations – large enterprises and government institutions, for example. The only other alternative would be building and staffing several distributed data centers in different geographical regions at great expense.

How Colocation Ties into Cloud Management

John Hall, Head of Portfolio at Atos UK/Ireland, asserts that most organizations fail to effectively manage their cloud deployments. He says that the combination of re-positioning existing IT departments to use cloud services and the fact direct executive-level communication occurs exclusively with cloud service providers creates loss of visibility. C-suite decision-makers effectively, "don't know what they don't know".