Combating COVID-19 Together
As Australia and the world, adjust to a new ‘business as unusual’ in the face of COVID-19, our thoughts are with the individuals impacted and the front-line responders keeping us safe and healthy.
As business leaders and IT teams feel the pressure to implement rapid solutions to keep their businesses running remotely, Data#3 is here to help. We have a number of solutions ready to deploy and resources available to help train staff from anywhere.
Data#3 has implemented our Business Continuity Plan, see here for customer updates regarding our management approach, business operations, supply chain, services and support. For specific updates as related to your Data#3 account, please contact us or your account manager directly.
Connected Classrooms
If your institution has an existing Microsoft EES agreement with Data#3, then you’re most likely already licensed for Microsoft Teams for Education. Cisco Webex Teams for Education is another popular choice for facilitating online education and a collaborative, anywhere learning experience. We can also support education institutions make the move to the cloud with Office 365.
Collaboration Training
Many of our customers are already equipped with an industry-leading collaboration platform, but are your staff ready to work from home, without sending your support team into meltdown? If your team needs a crash course in collaboration, visit our pages for Adopting Microsoft Teams and Adopting Cisco Webex Teams, or reach out to discuss training options.
Skype Health Check
Additionally, for those customers still reliant upon Microsoft’s Skype for Business, we can offer a health-check to ensure the on-premises service is setup and operating effectively to support the full suite of features for our customers’ staff.
Home Office & Study Solutions
As Australians are forced to self-isolate, we’re seeing an immediate rise in first-time remote workers. This means increased demand for mobile devices, headsets, compact printers and secure Wi-Fi.
Data#3 has a variety of work or study from home bundles, with hardware that delivers your SOE, applications and meets enterprise security requirements. As a prioritised Tier 1 partner of HP and Microsoft, and the largest Australian reseller of both vendors, Data#3 has buffer stock on hand and more on the way. We can also offer flexible procurement models such as leasing and Device-as-a-Service, so you can get devices out to employees fast, without significant upfront capital.
Ensure your people can be productive from anywhere with our home office solutions, featuring:
Remote Device Management
The days of sending laptops to IT to be built or imaged prior to allocating to staff are all but gone. Our customers need to be able to ship a brand new laptop to an employee (or student) and have the laptop download all the required software without any manual steps. This shortens the time taken to get a new device into the hands of an employee.
COVID-19 is accelerating the adoption of Modern Management, with the help of solutions such as Microsoft Intune and Endpoint Manager empowering IT teams to take a cloud-first approach to device management.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
The sudden displacement of staff often brings with it the need to run intensive apps on home devices and the need to expose sensitive data to staff at remote locations. Virtual desktops allow business apps to run from secure data centres, keeping the information central but presenting the information to users on remote devices, removing the need for high power personal devices and the need to send sensitive data outside the corporate firewall.
Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop or Nutanix Xi Frame solutions stream critical applications to home devices while keeping the sensitive information secure within the organisation’s data centre.
Cybersecurity for Remote Workers
The challenges in securely managing systems and data have increased dramatically. Cybercriminals are well aware of COVID-19; and will be using this period of wide-spread disruption to their advantage.
As employees now find themselves working from home offices, kitchen tables and living room lounges, the attack surface has dramatically increased. These pop-up productivity zones are full of insecure technology like consumer-grade Wi-Fi and Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets. Vulnerability assessments can help identify weaknesses in your new remote working model and security awareness training can help prepare your end users for today’s major threats. We are expecting to see an increase in DDOS attacks, as your under-pressure infrastructure becomes a more tempting target, as well as a rise in scams and phishing emails seeking to exploit your isolated workforce.
Our blog Cybersecurity Considerations for COVID-19 can help you devise a protection plan, and includes a number of offers and free trials from our security vendors. Be on high alert and take advantage of our security assurance solutions below if you need support.
Data Centre Management
Capacity Management
Moving people off-site changes what they access and how they access it. Managing the capacity of your compute, memory and storage infrastructure can be difficult at the best of times but during a crisis, with rapidly changing requirements, it is critical.
Our Turbonomics solution can be applied to any VMware based environment to find and free-up unused compute capacity. This capacity is then reallocated to critical applications to ensure they have all the compute resources required to run correctly. Turbonomics has a free trial available for customers to get started today, enquire below and we can help arrange a test drive. For Cisco customers speak to us about Cisco Workload Optimisation Manager.
Remote Management
Data Centres are commonly managed on-premises or through secure links. With an increasing number of individuals working from home, companies have reduced ability to both remotely monitor and remotely provision new services.
Remove the need to be on-site by using cloud-managed policies to deploy Cisco UCS and Hyperflex services through the use of Cisco Intersight.
Field Office in a Box
Government departments and other front-line organisations are dealing with escalating demands to set up field offices quickly. These offices need internet access, connectivity back into a primary office, local Wi-Fi and basic compute hardware (at a minimum). Our Cisco Meraki and HPE Aruba partnerships affords us the ability to meet these requirements head on. Contact us if you would like to learn more.
Public Health Monitoring
Our physical surveillance partnerships via Discovery Technology, a Data#3 Group company, enables us to deploy infra-red cameras, which can monitor the temperature of the human body, identifying people running fevers in real-time.
This can be used in any front-line situation, such as schools and large campuses, public transport, supermarkets and airports, where our customers need to protect their staff and patrons.
