Like most, here at Datactics, we are just finishing up our first full week of ‘Working from home’.
In line with government advice, we made the decision to close our office in Belfast and to port the entire workforce over to working from home last weekend.
As the guy in charge of making sure everything worked as normal, this was quite a daunting task. Thanks however to some forward-thinking business continuity planning I am glad to see that as we approach the end of week one we have had very few reported issues and only one small instance of downtime (note to self, disable auto reboots 😊). This is even more impressive when we look at the statistics of our VPN and cloud services usage reports. Our VPN usage has increased by over 70% whilst MS Teams usage (chosen as our main communication method) is up 80%!
Here at Datactics, we use a wide range of cloud services (AWS, Azure, Office 365) along with Sophos XG devices for our front facing VPN and firewall. With the VPN this means our employees have been able to continue to use the cloud services without the need for injecting any new firewall rules directly into them.
We also adopted the nature of Daily Standups within individual teams via MS Teams which have been a real asset as people adapt to a new way of working. These short/sharp meetings allow us to keep up to date on the project and individual needs and I have enjoyed hearing positive reports throughout the week on how well these have worked. (The key here for anyone looking to try the method is to keep the meetings short and to the point)
Looking back on week one I do so with a sigh of relief that everything has worked so smoothly and am thankful to have a dedicated team working alongside me to make things tick.
As you can see from the pics, it has not all been about work and on a personal note, I just want to encourage everyone to make sure to get that downtime in each day.
Exercise and chill time is invaluable for mental health and wellbeing as we all adjust to this new way of life.
This week I have enjoyed getting out for walks (in my local area from home), cycles (again from home), flying my DJI Mavic Mini and Lego building (I even have a new kit arriving next week).
For now, it’s onwards to the weekend and then back to it next week. I wonder what week two will bring?
Stay safe and well everyone.
Dave
