Crisis Comunications
COVID19: patterns emerging across all sectors
17 March 2020
Appurity’s consultants have been discussing the impact of the worsening Coronavirus crisis with our clients and talking them through options regarding crisis communications. Here’s our findings
Panic buying!
To enable employees to work from home, many organisations are purchasing expensive laptops without realising that they could save time and money simply by extending their UEM capabilities.
If a workforce has UEM on their smartphones – providing a secure browser and email – this can easily be transferred to Windows 10 or macOS on bring your own laptops (BYOL), providing employees with a behind-the-firewall browser and access to their organization’s intranet from their own devices at home. This secure model for delivering resources also includes its own virtual private network (VPN) and 2-factor authentication (2FA) if required.
However, instead of taking a step back and reviewing their UEM with a view to extending its capabilities, many organisations are panic buying brand new laptops, plus a VPN client, for their workforce, at a huge expense. Plus, the laptops need to be built from scratch, which is time consuming and adds further cost. Furthermore, these devices may not even be used after the Coronavirus crisis when people return to the office.
How to switch on remote working at a low cost
The average cost to extend UEM capabilities to enable your people to work on their own laptops and have access to your internal resources via a secure browser, plus email is £90 per user. Although some companies already have these licenses available so they can deploy devices with no additional cost.
Remember: licenses aren’t just for your workforce’s smartphones or tablets, they can be extended to bring your own laptops too.
By extending UEM licensing, workers can be up-and-running in 20 minutes at around one tenth of the cost of a new laptop and VPN client.
Extend capabilities further
BlackBerry Digital Workplace with AI-based security and desktop virtualisation was released late last year, and customers that adopted the technology are now able to provide remote workers, freelancers and contractors with access to corporate resources from their personal PCs or MacBooks.
This means that while employees work from home, they can use their own devices to access behind-the-firewall content, and have all the same capabilities that they have when they’re using their computer in the office.
Organisations that use BlackBerry Digital Workplace reduced complexity and costs, because they don’t need to procure new hardware for their remote workforce. Digital Workplace also provides a cost-effective alternative to Citrix and other VDI solutions.
With sophisticated email, browser, collaboration, and document editing tools, Digital Workplace is a complete solution that works with any device and provides online/offline access to any corporate resources; on-premises or in the cloud.
Crisis communications
During any crisis, it’s critical to be able to understand your supply chain and communicate openly and transparently with your staff.
Our customers are serious about protecting their business and employees in the event of any disaster, so several are making use of their BlackBerry AtHoc platform. The solution has been designed for crises such as the one that we are currently in, enabling crisis communications to coordinate an effective disaster response while rapidly ensuring employee safety.
For instance, when the virus first emerged in China, one of our clients used AtHoc to effectively monitor and alert employees within regionalised areas where the virus was reported to be prevalent.
Culture shock
Appurity foresees COVID-19 being the start of a cultural change that will accelerate the adoption of remote working.
“All our clients have a positive view of secure mobility, but companies, whether cultural or historical, are less keen on remote working. However, as we extend their mobile and security platform to be more productive and agile across all devices, there’s a shift taking place as they realise that remote working does work.”
Steve Whiter, Appurity
Contact Appurity
Investing in systems to enable remote working and business continuity is now a priority. That’s why our experts are on hand to answer your questions and explain how to implement solutions quickly and effectively within your organisation.
In addition, Appurity can help you to maximise the potential of your existing mobile licenses or technology to provide a fast and effective solution that will enable you to manage rapid business change.
