Rise In Remote Workers Can Help Kick-Start Or Markedly Improve Your Disaster Recovery Position.

By ajohnson May 16, 2008 @ 10:24 am

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area - home to expensive gas, long commutes, and rising bridge tolls.  I’m lucky. I commute to work by the Transbay bus system and telecommute from home one day a week.  But many other workers have no other option but to commute by car to their workplace.  In the words of the great Chaka Khan, “I feel for you.”  With the rise in gas prices, commuters and the companies they work for must be wondering if the “virtual workplace” is for them. 

For those companies feeling pressure from current and prospective employees to expand your telecommuting program, do it.  But before you do, get prepared.  Bill Detwiler from TechRepublic, wrote a short article about the topic and provides several links to resources on how to get your IT department prepared for remote employees.

What Bill doesn’t mention are the additional considerations to think about when adopting this type of technology.  You may decide to upgrade your VPN to accommodate the increase in remote workers but the VPN can also be your company’s communication lifeline in the event of a disruption or disaster.  You can mitigate risk by including a few disaster recovery scenarios during your planning, testing and implementation phases of your project and you can do so with little effort.  While disaster recovery isn’t the primary focus of the implementation, it can be part of it.

If you’re finding it difficult to change the mindset of your management team to dedicate proper resources toward IT disaster recovery, it is definitely possible to piggy back onto other projects, like remote workers, a VPN upgrade or other IT project. A low incremental cost project can help plant the seed and from there you may start seeing a change in management’s thinking.