Teneo advises organisations to prepare their networks for increase in home working

With the Met Office predicting snow and wintry conditions over the next few days, most businesses can recall the heavy snowfall which hit across the UK in February this year, including the heaviest snowfall to reach London in over a decade which caused widespread disruption to transport. One in five employees were not able to get to work during the February snow. When the weather becomes more treacherous, most companies advise that employees who commute to work by car or public transport should work from home.

Many companies struggle to cope with a mass of employees attempting to log on to their corporate IT network. Employees who only log on occasionally have difficulties in remembering how to connect and to ensure they have the correct equipment and passwords. The end-user experience for many employees is typically poor as they contend with slow connections and file download speeds 10-20 times slower than at the office, which impacts on staff productivity. Vital business applications being used remotely become slow and cumbersome.

Teneo is advising all organisations that are planning to significantly increase home working during bad weather or as a result of any other uncontrollable situation to first ensure their network infrastructure can cope and to investigate solutions that will use valuable bandwidth more effectively. Teneo can help businesses by reviewing business continuity plans and establishing how these plans will impact on an organisation’s network. Network ‘stress’ tests include the use sophisticated equipment to simulate the effect on an organisations’ network when the majority of employees log in remotely.

Teneo is working with a wide range of organisations to install Riverbed Wide Area Network (WAN) optimisation appliances which can radically reduce the amount of WAN data traffic. Using Riverbed Steelhead appliances, outlying branch offices can experience Local Area Network (LAN)-like performance over the WAN, reducing data traffic by up to 60-95%. For remote workers, solutions such as Riverbed Mobile can enable employees to enjoy fast access to an organisations’ key application packages, with file downloads four times faster than normally possible.

Teneo recommends testing the capabilities of an organisation’s network and exploring the potential of solutions such as WAN optimisation. With many organisations struggling with restricted capital budgets, Teneo can supply a solution on a managed or a leased basis.

James Hall, marketing director, Teneo, commented:
“As any business knows, situations do arise – be it snow, floods, swine flu or sudden loss or closure of a business site - so the key advice as always is to be prepared. There is no need for employee productivity to dramatically reduce or critical business applications to suffer due to these situations, many companies have excellent solutions which allow their employees to work seamlessly off-site. Investing in your network for business continuity reasons also benefits the everyday running of your business, allowing your employees to work more flexibly.”