So we’re in weird times, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the word unprecedented written down before (well, unless you include all the sales emails every time someone releases a new piece of software). But in general people are just getting on with it. The same goes for us here at Coffee Cup Solutions, we still have our full team working and supporting people adjust to working from home.
Sure, things are a little bit different. Projects are being put on hold or tweaked to account for all the changes but generally we’re still very busy here. To put this in to some statistics, in the last 3 weeks we’ve been directly involved in;
- Helping over 2000 new people connect to their work resources from all over the world.
- Setting up VPN solutions using 9 different technologies, leveraging what people already have in place to save extra expenditure in these troubled times.
- Swapping multiple users away from the on-prem server / scenario to something like Microsoft Teams, and provided information on how their teams can use the new solutions.
- Built new monitoring platforms to ensure that the user experience is as good as it can be.
- Working with companies ranging from single offices to FTSE 100 companies with staff all over the world and public sector/local councils.
- Securing third party setups that whilst do work, should not be setup as there are many attack vectors to think about when setting up remote access.
- Monitoring every one of our support customers external IP addresses to ensure if anything is setup without us knowing that it’s setup correctly and securely.
We’ve also been doing the standard support requests “my printer isn’t working”, “I need this file restoring from backup” etc.
When things looked like things needed to be taken seriously a while back, we did some testing to ensure that we could continue to work without a physical office, and I’m glad we did. You have to practice what you preach in our industry and we now have all of our staff working from home. We’ve got the same problems I’m sure every business does working from home – one of the main ones being it’s just a little bit lonely – so if you do need support, give us a call – I promise you there will be someone that will jump at the chance to have a bit of a chat!
It’s interesting watching the ticket statistics over the week, I think (and it’s only a personal opinion) that the weekend vibe is starting a bit earlier in the week.
The above graph is our tickets for this week, people start the week very excited to get working, but towards the end of the week…well it’s almost the weekend!
What I’m trying to say from all of this, as much of a change this is for everyone, it’s very much business as usual for us here at Coffee Cup Solutions – we’re busy, eager to work and enjoying the challenges that crop up (although I wish they’d have been in better circumstances). Feel free to give me a call or send me an email if you’re struggling with your IT at the moment and together I’m sure we can work out a way to improve the situation.
Tom Beech
Technical Director