The weather outside is frightful

Property damage is from winter storms one thing. As you can see it’s easy to tabulate and throw into a graphic. But business productivity is another. It’s a larger number but because we don’t report to our insurance companies it doesn’t get measured.

Business productivity doesn’t get the glamor shot in news articles. Unless it’s the government, or how many flights airlines had to cancel.

Office of Personnel Management chief John Berry has said each snow day costs taxpayers $100 million in lost productivity from federal workers.

So if a snow day costs the Federal government $100 Million, how much does it cost you? If someone can’t make it into the office because there’s snow on the road how much did that cost your business? If you decide to send everyone home early so they can avoid a rush hour of slipping and sliding and hopefully live another to work another day, how much does that cost you?

I know it costs a lot. We can help to mitigate those costs by implementing some things that you probably already own.

 Now might be a good time to review how your staff can access company resources to work from home.

Free or nearly free options:

• Outlook Anywhere, if they have a laptop or smartphone
• Outlook Web Access, if they don’t have a laptop
• Sharepoint can be accessed from the web for some or all
• Remote access to their computer in the office
• Remote access to shared files and folders, if you have SBS 2011

Additional options:

• Dedicated remote computers. A small bank a computers specifically for remote access.
• Remote Services: to provide whole desktop experience
• Remote Services: to provide access to a specific application

Poor Choices:

• VPN – provides remote access but potential for infection is very high
• LogMeIn or GoToMyPC: Why bother when remote access is free and built into the operating system of your computer and provides better security

We can help you implement these solutions or train you on how to use them. We can also secure them. The trade-off in allowing remote access to be certain that we’ve secured it properly. Once secure your employees can work from home and be as functional as in the office.

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