Supporting Government's Working from Home Needs
Short on time? Here's an overview:
Governments are under increasing pressure to provide more robust, efficient and secure work from home options for their employees as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Governments have traditionally operated with a majority of employees on-premise, using the equipment and networks onsite. The crisis has flipped that environment; social distancing has caused many employees to work remotely, sometimes on their own devices and relying on home or public wi-fi networks to connect into their work systems.
Governments are under increasing pressure to provide more robust, efficient and secure work from home options for their employees as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Governments have traditionally operated with a majority of employees on-premise, using the equipment and networks onsite. The crisis has flipped that environment; social distancing has caused many employees to work remotely, sometimes on their own devices and relying on home or public wi-fi networks to connect into their work systems. While the operating environment has changed, the need to maintain and even improve functionality has not. This rapid shift from the on-premise workforce to the majority working from diverse locations can be especially difficult on public agencies attempting to maintain business continuity and continuous support for increased citizen needs during a crisis.
Government leaders should also recognize that after the pandemic threat is resolved, things will have fundamentally changed. Government must prepare to pivot to what will become the new normal, similar to how many (as had relatively little affect on Australia) reacted following the 2008 economic crisis when governments identified pathways to automate more services and find new online tools as a means of offsetting revenue losses. As governments find solutions requiring them to push into digital transformation (providing for secure remote users at scale, moving to more cloud consumption vs hardware) they will be positioned to then keep moving forward and apply those same solutions in more “normal times.”
The Unisys Solution
As an example, in an effort to rapidly decrease the spread of the COVID-19 virus, in the US one state has closed all state government offices and asked all non-essential employees to work remotely. The state asked Unisys to work with its central IT Agency to provide a telework solution. The solution enabled remote access while allowing the state government and its agencies to seamlessly continue operations and fulfill its mission of delivering services to citizens in a timely and secure manner.