How Managed Services Can Enable Remote Workers

Many businesses have recently needed to adapt and change their business model. Businesses which "weather the storm" change how they work and create new policies, ushering in a new normal. Many must make difficult decisions to close offices or shut down entire divisions. Others shift their workforces to remote in efforts to sustain their business. 

These decisions have a serious impact on existing logistics and flexibility. Many need experts that can execute with speed and flexibility to shift an entire workforce to remote workers, all while maintaining rigor and discipline.

Businesses may not have the people, process and tools needed to change quickly. Ensuring flexible processes while driving results is where WWT Managed Services shines. We pride ourselves on servicing customers with the freedom and flexibility they need to adapt, even when transforming an entire workforce. One of our valued customers proved, without a shadow of a doubt, this exact scenario.

The ask: Enable over 2000 workers to work from home

The organization engaged with WWT Managed Services to roll-out updates to their SD-WAN solution for only a few workers. However, their leaders decided they needed to close offices as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This forced our customer to immediately relocate their Service Desk workforce — they needed to work from home. 

A task this great had never been conceived, the logistics and technical execution at this scale and timeline was unthinkable.

We rallied to source, provision and ship devices to needed locations. This needed to happen using the same SD-WAN solution. WWT scaled the solution to the needed 1000% growth while delivering devices on-time. Over 2000 workers moving to their homes were able to receive devices as they left their office. Once home, they were able to connect and work without interruption, and creating this remote service center for our customer was accomplished in only three days.

But the work was not done

Days following, massive changes and updates were required. Automation was built because OEM tools could not process bulk changes. WWT was up to the task, pulling in subject matter experts who built utilities where tooling did not exist. We worked day and night to ensure devices were aligned to correct configurations, even ensuring all devices were named and assigned to correct users.

All updates were completed with no impact to users or the network. Custom reports from our monitoring platform aided our customer to watch over their newly self-managed remote workforce.

WWT Managed Services created what is now the new normal for this customer: remote workers. To this day, they don't know if they will ever fully return to the office. The customer praised WWT, citing a few critical examples: incoming call wait time is down to single digits and there is a 100 percent attendance in employee shifts, all this while their competitors are seeing the opposite.