This virus is not relenting.
The Covid-19 virus is threatening our ways of life. This is the new normal. As some countries revert to martial law to curtail the spread of the virus, we must adopt modern ways of working so that our lives can continue.
Some facts are clear:
The kids must continue to study.
That means parents must embrace home study. Subscribe to an online learning platform. Or hire a teacher. Or you as a parent put on the teacher’s hut and provide both formal and informal home teaching. Use this as an opportunity for bonding.
The worst part of one’s life is to disrupt education by for example skipping a year. Time, once lost, cannot be recovered. The silver lining in all this pandemic fiasco is the children finally have an opportunity to bond with their parents!
We must eat.
To win over the COVID-19, you must be able to survive the virus, hunger, and other diseases. You don’t want to give in to starvation or coldness or lack of quality care for patients already with long term illnesses.
Yet this pandemic is threatening double jeopardy. It is making hospitals too risky for anyone, including the patients already there. With food markets and supermarkets being closed, and global supply chains being disrupted, the virus could cut off the world from essential nutrients and fresh foods.
We all know some countries rely on a just-in-time global supply system for fresh foods from all over the world. First-rate food distributors supply hotels and food markets in Asia, Europe, America, and UAE, to mention but four, receive daily fresh food supplies who in turn supply the city. You must have money on your account to afford to buy food.
In most developed countries, fresh foods are expensive.
With this lock-down, you must explore how to get food to your home or condo since the stomach must process something.
This means you must find a way to continue working.
How to work remotely?
Remote working means to accomplish your daily tasks away from the office. If your job does not require your physical presence at the place of work, then start working remotely so that you continue value creation amid the lock-down.
With technology, jobs like physical security monitoring via CCTV can be done remotely, and link to a standby response team, in case of any issue. Share on XCompanies must conduct an assessment of their processes and key-value delivery activities and identify ones that can be done remotely, and which employees can be given remote access. Keep in mind that the hackers are on the rampage, and ready to exploit the confusion. Proper accountability for remote access must be made, the links hardened from a security point of view and continuous monitoring is done to ensure that only folks authorized are given access.
What you must do:
Invest in capabilities and systems that support remote working. This included secure connection via fixed IP addresses using an encrypted tunnelling protocol, or a virtual private network, to the respective employees that must access the resources.
Whitelist each IP address, and limit access to specific resources to avoid damage and possible interception of traffic.
Provide mobile gadgets and working tools to enable staff to have the flexibility to work from home and office as well as implement multiple points of backups to increase the resilience of the business in case of a disaster like a hacking incident.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Copyright Mustapha B Mugisa, 2020. All rights reserved.
