These are extraordinary times, but we're working hard to keep things running as normal.
The ongoing coronavirus is quickly proving to be something of an acid test for the abilities of IT support companies. In recent days, TMB has been contacted by several business owners who are finding their current IT suppliers simply cannot meet the current demand for remote working. Thankfully, TMB is fully equipped and ready to help in this situation.
First of all, TMB itself has the ability to work completely remotely. Currently, we're operating with a skeleton crew, with the majority of our staff working from home. but if the government orders a complete lockdown, we will be able to continue working with all of our offices closed. This capability is exactly what we offer our customers, with services such as:
Unfortunately for other providers, they either have gaps in their remote-working portfolios or they are unable to implement their different services in a joined-up way. That leads to fragmented, incomplete solutions that don’t quite do the job as well as they should.
^ Office 365 is an essential tool in any business's remote working toolkit
However, we're not here to just pour scorn on other IT support companies – certainly not at a time like this. The fact is we’re in uncharted waters here, and it’s perfectly understandable if some IT firms are struggling to adapt.
Luckily for us, we’ve spent the last few years transforming from a traditional IT firm into a lean, mean managed services machine. A big part of that has been embracing cloud technology, including Microsoft Azure services and Office 365.
Naturally, there are some instances where we need to send engineers to our customer’s premises, and that will be affected by social distancing recommendations, but for the most part, TMB is fully operational.
That means we’re still providing 24-hour service desk access, every single day of the year. It also means our backup and disaster recovery customers are still protected and are able to access their data, whenever and wherever they might want it. And all our monitoring and patching services are fully operational too.
As Matt Fuller, TMB’s Head of Helpdesk & Service, explains, our ability to work remotely has been helped significantly by forward thinking:
“As soon as the government began talking about its response to the coronavirus, we anticipated that our team were more than likely going to be working from home,” Matt says, “so we had everyone test this a few weeks in advance.”
This preparation and testing is what has enabled us to successfully roll out the same systems to our customers. “We knew that remote working requests were going to come in thick and fast as the government’s stance on coronavirus changes.
“Fortunately, with our fully managed desktop service, we're able to connect to our client’s devices wherever they take them. We have had a lot of clients take home their desktop PCs and then require connection to their company network. With SonicWall firewalls and NetExtender SSL VPN connections back to the office network, this has been a great solution and a huge relief for our clients. Keeping things simple but secure means remote working can be achieved easily without compromising on security.”
^ We've been setting up firewalls for customers to ensure they're safe while they're working from home
On top of that, our projects team is sourcing new hardware for customers and making sure it’s all set up properly.
Things are tough out there right now, but everyone here at TMB is working hard to ensure our clients get what they need to keep their businesses going. In a time of such great uncertainty, our aim is to provide as much reliability as we possibly can so that IT can be one less thing for our customers to worry about.
How is your business coping with the coronavirus? Leave us a comment below and let us know. And if you have any remote working requirements, please contact us on 0333 900 9050 or use the form on our contact page.