Is Virtualisation a cure for Swine Flu?

There are many reasons why it’s beneficial to virtualise your environment and the current swine flu pandemic, unfortunately is a perfect example.

A virtual environment has very few physical touch points, meaning you can administer and use the environment from anywhere you can get a secure network connection. This is particularly important in situations where it’s not safe to leave your house.

Consider a virtualised desktop environment: All of your computer resources are kept in your data centre where there is robust network connectivity and all your data is centrally stored and protected. The only thing that leaves the protection of your data centre is the users’ desktop displays – and that is over an encrypted connection to ensure its privacy.

With your entire environment virtualised, the decision of where your employees work is no longer a technical one, but a business one. And if you are effected by the flu pandemic, this vitualisation will allow your critical staff to stay at home and still be effective.

Giving your staff the flexibility of where they work, even in times of a flu pandemic, provides you and your employees with key benefits.

• It improves employee morale. You’re showing that you are concerned about their health and well being.
• It ensures that your business can continue to operate, even if the government or health officials implement mandatory travel restrictions.
• It keeps all of your critical business data within your data centre. Even if something were to happen to your key staff, the data is protected.

Unfortunately, situations like swine flu are not just one off’s; train strikes, terrorist attacks or even just the common cold can change our ability to get all employees into their place of work and connected to their systems overnight.

At b2Lateral, we work with many of our clients to understand what provisions they have in place to enable a company and its employees to continue to work, even when they cannot get into the office. We are advising more of them to consider virtualisation as a low-cost, yet effective way to have in place a contingency plan for such eventualities.

If you want to discuss your contingency plans, or want to find out more about virtualisation, please contact the team at b2Lateral on 0844 664 2565 or email us at info@b2lateral.net