Between the current New England flooding and the Snowpocalypse in the Mid-Atlantic States earlier this year, 2010 has brought to light the need to remain productive despite weather. Today's post is by Matt Martin, who is Manager, Technology and Services at Ingram Marine Group based in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also a member of The ITK Group, an organization that helps small businesses and nonprofits understand next generation tech and how they can apply it to their organization.

In January and February we were all watching what was going on in the Mid-Atlantic states weather patterns and the amount of snowfall on the Washington DC/Baltimore area was astounding. You know that when an event gets its own Facebook page, its a pretty big deal.

For kids its nice, you get out of school, hang out with friends, play outside in the snow. But for adults, the work doesn't stop. Pay me now, or pay me later. Lots of companies have spent a lot of money to plan for disasters, but most of their planning has revolved around the loss of a facility in the event of a natural disaster. This line of planning got us thinking.

What happens when the facility is fine, but your employees simply cannot get to your building?

Its business as usual for your customers across the country and around the world. But if your people cannot make it to the office, their productivity will slow to a crawl. Typically businesses will supply some employees with laptops so they can work remotely but this is often a small subset of your workforce. Even with these laptops the standard way of connecting back to the office is often via a VPN (virtual private network) that usually requires some type of licensing, or has a limited capacity. IT typically scales these solutions based on current use. So I might have 300 employees but typical VPN load is 10 to 30 concurrent connections at one time so they will size their VPN solution to handle that many connections at once.

In the event of a snowpocalypse or a swine flu outbreak, what are your options?

Simply buying enough VPN connections for all of your employees just doesn't make sense. What you can do is think about deploying systems that are nimble or flexible right out of the box, or go with a solution that could be implemented quickly, at a limited cost.

There are several options, here are three that we have found effective:

SaaS Tools
When I think scalable and nimble I first think of Software as a Service applications (SaaS). These tools are a good example of day-to-day business tools that are also very conducive to workshifting.

These applications are typically hosted at the service providers data center and they are often accessed by a simple web browser. The key driver with these applications is that they are hosted outside of your business which means the service provider has already thought through how to make access to their applications as easy as possible. By using SaaS, your employees already know how to access their data so in the state of an emergency their learning curve is very short. The number of really inexpensive to free services that are being provided today is truly amazing.

A few examples:

• Google Apps - Google Apps is a hosted service that provides email, calendar, basic documents, video chat, and others. Google Apps is traditionally slanted towards smaller businesses but they have had some recent wins with larger companies.
• Highrise CRM - Made by 37signals, Highrise is a drop dead easy tool for managing your businesses contacts and your communications with those contacts. Elegant and thoughtful features make this tool a joy to use.

Citrix GoToMyPC
GoToMyPC by Citrix could be a happy medium for a lot of organizations. The deployment is simple, and the cost at $19.95 per month per user is hard to beat to give your employees an easy to use and secure remote access system. Also, the connectivity doesn't need a VPN solution so it can scale easier than a traditional VPN.  The premise is pretty easy. You sign up for GoToMyPC, no real client install needed, and the system creates an SSL VPN on the fly. The SSL encryption secures the traffic between your home PC and your work PC.  Once the connection is established you can have full access to the desktop on your system at work. This really aids in productivity because you are essentially sitting in front of your system so you are familiar with the tools at hand. 

Microsoft to the Rescue 
For better or worse, when a lot of enterprises think software they think Microsoft. Microsoft is often considered to be strictly on premise software but they have recently come out with some SaaS offerings of their own and they have some nice tools to make working out of the office easier. The drawback to their nonSaaS tools are that they can be technically complex to setup, so do your planning plenty in advance to get these up and running and tested.
A couple of their tools that are specifically designed to support mobile use are Microsoft Office Groove and a new feature in Windows 7 called Direct Access.

Microsoft Office Groove - Groove is essentially a peer-to-peer software tool that allows you to setup an online workspace and then share documents within that workspace. Behind the scenes, Groove replicates the data that has been placed in the workspace between the computers of everyone who has been invited. This gives you the flexibility to go offline and work on your documents, then go back online and sync your changes with the team. See how Microsoft used Groove and SharePoint to support caregivers during Katrina.
 
Direct Access - Direct Access is a new tool that Microsoft released as part of Windows 7. Essentially Direct Access will allow you to drop your laptop onto the internet anywhere and then your machine will automatically create a secure connection back to the home office. Its an end users nirvana but the technical requirements (needs Windows 7 and 2008 Server R2) could make this a challenge for IT to setup and deploy.

So what do you think? Any snowpocalypse or flooding stories you would like to share?

Photo Credit: ndutzan