Core: Cloud Conversion and the Rush to Remote

The team at Core are no strangers to helping clients to transition successfully to cloud-based working, and as we recently discussed with them they have a structured change management process to enable this with maximum success and minimal disruption.

Right now though of course everything about the way we collaborate is disrupted, and Core is rising to the challenge of supporting their customers to switchover fast to home-based working — whatever their preference or starting point.  I caught up with Sales and Marketing Director, Rye Austin, and Chief Operating Officer, Brian Packer, to see how this was going and what challenges they were facing. After all, surely a lot of their clients already supported working from home, at least to some extent? But this can mean so many different things…

Packer explained, “there’s a difference between working from home one day a week or occasionally, accessing your email and Microsoft apps — when you might leave your access to your business applications to when you’re in the office. But when you’re working from home all the time suddenly, you also need to get to the filing system, the CRM… A lot of people use a VPN to connect into the corporate environment. And VPNs are typically dimensioned for a percentage of people working at home. All of a sudden you’re needing to add new licences, increase your capacity. Can you scale it all up?”

It was clear that the support clients need is highly dependent on where they’re starting from — from their cloud readiness to whether individuals even have corporate laptops.

As Austin said, “we’ve had to set up some virtual desktop environments for clients on home devices so that users can come into that first and then hop into their corporate environment. But you then still have the issue that you need to make sure that the information that they’re accessing is protected, because what you don’t want is somebody coming in and then being able to download data in an uncontrolled way to a non-corporate device…”

Once the transition is accomplished, with the support of professional providers to manage the security and access issues, a lot of people are finding that — despite challenging circumstances of kids at home and rolling news and anxiety — they’re adapting well to the new reality.

Remain Productive and Effective

When managers understand that people can remain productive and effective, one of their main objections to remote working is removed, and managers themselves learn to operate differently, as Packer continued, “We have ‘Teams’ channels for departments, and individual one-on-ones, and we also have project-based sessions. I am talking to three or four people about different things at the same time in different channels, and moving all those work streams ahead.”

Of course you’d expect power users of Teams, like Core to be across the full capabilities of the tool suite, but they’re using their tactical knowledge to help clients build capacity fast but in a structured way, as Austin explained, “because we can’t do the normal governance planning, we’re offering controlled bite-sized rollouts to get people working for the most urgent use cases”. Later on they can dig into the project management and other functionalities of Teams, which are really ideal for remote workflow monitoring and visibility.”

All of which feeds into the speculation about what work and the workplace will look like in the future, once lockdowns are lifted, and we could all theoretically go back to the office. As Packer concluded,

“I think the way we work will change as a result of this. Even though remote has been forced upon them, it’s probably not as scary as some thought”

“Office space is expensive, but now there are options and choices available.”

To find out how Core can help you realise the full capabilities of remote working, visit the Resource area on their website. There is a host of content offering practical guidance and support to help keep your business working.