the exclamake! blog

Bird-flu… you’re thinking? Here’s the situation. Let’s say there is an outbreak this fall. A pandemic could cause officials to begin quarantine or business owners may simply tell affected employees to stay home. If the outbreak is bad enough the in-office workforce reduction could significantly affect your ability to conduct business.

Is your company equipped to have them work away from the office? Interesting article from Network World that speaks about preparedness for a potential bird-flu outbreak. A quote from the article:

A survey last month of 300 Minnesota business officials found most thought a flu pandemic would significantly affect their business, but only 18% had preparedness plans in place. The poll sponsored by the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy found that close to two thirds said they were already prepared or somewhat prepared to move employees to remote locations or let them work at home, while 29% said they were not prepared.

Although the scope of the above article is for larger corporations, the good news is that small and medium businesses (SMBs) could be benefiting from secure remote access now at very reasonable costs. Note that this cost is usually recovered within a few months since workers can be more productive when away for sickness, company travel, maternity leave, etc.

One solution is SSL-VPN. This solution offers a very simple, easily maintained method to give your workers secure remote access to company data and applications. The SonicWALL SSL-VPN 200 is ideal for businesses that need less than 10 simultaneous remote connections. A demo of this device shows how simple it is for end-users. The SSL-VPN 200 has an MSRP of $595 which makes it an incredible value for SMBs.

Another solution is Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2003 which comes with the Remote Web Workplace. Remote Web Workplace is a web portal that gives employees convenient remote access to Outlook, the company intranet, and remote access to their desktop through Remote Desktop. A streamlined VPN client package can also be downloaded from the Remote Web Workplace if needed. Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition has an MSRP of $599.