5. Test your telework plans and systems. Many companies will rely on employees working from home in the event of a flu outbreak. However, their remote access systems may not be ready for so many employees using them at the same time. Experts recommend a trial run, where you allow a significant number of your staff to work from home for a day and then see how well your systems and applications function. You may need to buy more ports or cards for your remote access systems. "Make sure you have high availability for your remote access systems," says Phil Hochmuth, senior analyst with Yankee Group. "Make sure you have failover to secondary remote access technologies. You want to provide as many external portals into the enterprise as you can."
6. Ensure key employees have broadband access. Dial-up access won't cut it for employees who need to use enterprise applications for an extended period of time. Make sure key employees have broadband access from home as well as mobile broadband access. Mobile data cards are a good solution, Hochmuth says. "In a worst case scenario, people may not be working from home. They may be leaving the area for health or safety reasons, and they may need to take their laptops with them." Hochmuth recommends buying mobile broadband cards from multiple carriers. "If you get a lot of those to your most important employees, that's another high availability, load balancing tactic on the end user side," he says.
7. Test your Web-based applications. Make sure that your Web-based e-mail and other applications have up-to-date feature sets. "Make sure that your Web-enabled applications are on par with the level of service in the traditional versions of the applications," Hochmuth says. "Identify a few power users and have them go through the paces of the Web mail or remote access. At the other end of the spectrum, grab one or two novice IT users and see how hard it is for them to do remote access of these applications." Hochmuth says another idea is to look at consumer-based Web applications such as Google Docs for document sharing, Skype for VoIP or AIM for instant messaging as a back-up to internal applications.
8. Cross train your employees. Figure out which key applications need to keep running no matter what, and who can keep them running. Cross-train employees so that you have enough people with the right skills and certifications to keep your mission critical applications functioning. This is especially true in regulated industries like banking, where employees need to be certified to handle customer data. "Get people cross certified so you can keep the doors open," De Lotto says.