The world has changed. 2020 had so much promise and now we’ve had to reshape the way we look at work completely. With most companies transitioning to a teleworking model, there will be and has already been, a significant disruption in productivity. The companies that have leant on remote working or flexible office hours historically are much better suited to accommodate a dramatic shift, the magnitude of which I haven’t seen in my lifetime.

For some workers, myself included, the teleworking landscape is not new. People have transitioned standard workdays to be outside of the office, either from home, co-working spaces or hipster cafes. With this lifestyle being popular for some time now, there is plenty of great advice on how to maintain a healthy balance between work and personal life. I have summarised the most important ones below.

Create a work location

Whether you have an office at home or a make-shift on your dining table, create a space that is dedicated solely to work. You must resist the temptation to work from a laptop on the couch or worse, in bed. This is not only detrimental to your health, but mentally you are starting in the negative, making you less productive. The cognitive shift from ‘on fire achieving goals’ to ‘this is where I normally binge-watch three seasons and a family value meal’’’ is staggeringly quick.

Trust me.

Optimize your workspace

Optimizing may be harder currently, but you should try to make your new workspace as ‘optimal’  as possible. Use a comfortable chair, raise your screens, use external keyboards, good lighting. The more comfortable you are in this space the more focused you will be on working. But more importantly, one crucial point that is handed down from generation to generation; do not work in your PJs. You’ve already decided your commitment from the get-go.

Have your shower. Brush your teeth. Put on casual work clothes. These physical steps do trigger parts in your brain to help get you in the work mindset.

Schedule your workday

Don’t change too much! Make sure you keep that alarm, if it was 5:20 am before you started working from home, keep it that way. Maintain the same regiment that you operated on when you weren’t teleworking. This will be important for you to stay in a work-focused mindset and to create that atmosphere throughout your house.

This is crucial at both ends of the workday as well, maintain a strict start and finish time. Just because the laptop is there, doesn’t mean you’re on the clock. Shut down all your tabs, press the off button and cultivate that defined work/life balance.

Maintain your To-Do List

The management of your task list becomes paramount when there are fewer people involved in the day to day proceedings. Keeping your most important tasks top-of-mind and in your queue will help keep you on track in the days and weeks ahead. Try and put the highest priority and most challenging first every day. Get them done before your brain realizes and kicks in those ten fantastic valid excuses to procrastinate.

Further, lists are a fantastic way to help decrease anxiety! Every part will help over the coming months.

“Organize and contain a sense of inner chaos, which can make your load feel more manageable.” – Psychology Today

Act more healthily

A lot of us will now have a terrific opportunity to be more active than usual. I, for one, am much more comfortable doing ten push-ups at home compared to in the office. The Heart Foundation of Australia recommends that you should get up from your desk every thirty minutes, this means you will have ample opportunity to do some light exercise. Also, the time saved in your commute and getting ready for work can be reassigned to something more movement-based.

Couple this with a healthy diet and you will keep your energy up throughout the day.

Stay Connected

However isolated you are, you should always stay connected. Start creating the habit of regular communications with your friends, family and also your co-workers, ensuring that you’re not doing everyday solo. Your business probably has an instant messenger but if not, get one going. You can have a more personable, casual chat through a messenger that you can’t through email. Plus GIFs are more socially acceptable.

Following these steps and recognizing how you work at your best, will help increase your productivity while teleworking.

And if all else fails, there’s now an abundance of time to prank your flatmate.

Keep calm and stay safe (flatmate).

“How well do you know your IoT network? If you’ve had to stop and think you’ve answered our question”.

Having confidence in your operational capabilities to deliver efficient connections and real-time insights is a myth without effective IoT management. A business’s head can become a murky place swimming with data on their IoT network that often gets pushed into unseen depths. This, however, doesn’t have to be the case. So, how can you throw out a lifeline, simplify and get practical with your IoT management? Below is a list of ways to enhance your management skills to boost your confidence.

1. Cloud Network Management

Rather than trying to maintain traditional device-focused networks, businesses should introduce wan-optimised cloud networks to improve the reliability of IoT connectivity. Cloud computing provides a great base for IoT networks as it has ample storage space for IoT data. Without the cloud, IoT data may have to be stored in multiple servers, which makes it much harder to analyse and compare. If you are currently unsure where all your data is being stored and collected, Open-AudIT can collect your data from multiple networks, ensuring that it is organised, catalogued and easily configurable into meaningful reports.

2. Ensure Scalability

Over 25B units, that is the 2021 expert forecasts for install base IoT endpoints, with services spending $500B on IoT. So it’s time to pivot, businesses need to be flexible in introducing new devices and expanding their IoT network. An IoT network should be ready for the lights, camera and action of integrating new services, apps and data; without the negative effect on their networks. Gartner mirrors the importance of scalability and practical IoT infrastructure management in this podcast.

3. AI

From chatbots to automated customer service enquiries, automation is being introduced in multiple areas of a business. The stronger your communication between devices on an IoT network, the more processes that can be efficiently automated. You’ll have the power for devices to be able to communicate with each other over a query; saving the time of a physical employee transporting information from one database to another.

Why Is Simplifying Your IoT Management Beneficial?

By simplifying your IoT management, you allow your IoT network to work more efficiently. For example, work processes will become more streamlined and everyday tasks can be completed intuitively. This leads to better customer satisfaction and engagement. Employees in your business will also benefit from simplified IoT management as they will have a streamlined workflow and will be able to manage their time more effectively. Open-AudIT will ensure employees have maximum control over network devices, so they have more time to focus on creative tasks. This will help employees to feel more valued, helping you attract and retain the best team members.

How To Start Practical Iot Management?

Before you try to simplify your IoT management before the whistle goes off, understanding of the current condition of your IoT network is essential. Use tools like Open-audIT to see beneath the surface with precise x-ray vision quality device discovery and control. Simplifying the end-to-end process Opmantek tools allow users to gain unparalleled visibility into their IoT network, giving businesses the chance to grow on a global level.

Practical IoT management involves more than just managing IoT data, it involves managing how IoT devices connect and communicate with one another. The best way to start IoT management is by having a clear and thorough understanding of your IoT network. With greater understanding and control of the devices of your IoT network, you’ll be able to make more accurate choices about how you use your data and what software would benefit your network. For more guidance about practical IoT management, talk to our experts about showing you a live demo.

There’s been much written already about how to manage the human factors of a remote workforce. Everyone has an opinion about the best practices for dealing with changes to productivity, communication and the possible impact of loneliness, not to mention the health and safety concerns of the home office. People can look after themselves, but for the IT manager, enabling the systems in a compressed time-frame is a real challenge.

There is little quality advice on how to quickly mobilize your office-based workforce to work from home from an IT Management perspective. You need to be creative, leave no stone unturned and be prepared for some risk mitigation. Here are some steps you can help guide you through this process.

The process is simple and can be summarised as:

1. Ensure business continuity through remote working.
2. Manage the associated risks to security, in particular data loss, unauthorised access and computer viruses.
3. Manage the infrastructure to ensure highly available and reliable network services, the internet and network has never been more critical.

1. Your first decision. To BYOD or not BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

In most industries, the sales staff are already set-up for remote access. These staff will already have computers specifically set-up for the job requirements and be capable of working from anywhere. It’s a matter of duplicating (and adjusting accordingly for each job role) what you have already in place for these staff specifically for others to use.

Then there’s everyone else who is not mobile capable using a desktop computer, 9 to 5. What do you do to get these people working from home? Ideally, your IT team or outsourced service provider can offer some help and support. But what if you don’t? What can you do in the short (and medium) term?

Let’s deal with the Short Term. It buys you time for the medium term, when you can make more informed decisions.

Let the staff use (in as many cases as possible) their BYOD home computer as:

1. It’s an immediate solution.
2. It is already set-up (and hopefully working).
3. The user is already familiar with it.
4. They will have the Internet.
5. It may already have some access to cloud applications (so can do some work).

2. How much risk does unplanned BYOD bring to your environment?

Your office computers are likely to have a standard operating environment (SOE) so you will already know your minimum specs for the computers. You will know in detail your hardware and software versions, network settings, VPN and security details. They will be configured and locked down as appropriate for their purpose.

Using this bare minimum as your baseline you can use an audit tool (such as Open-Audit Enterprise or Open-Audit Cloud).

To ensure BYOD equipment is ready to connect to your network, you can audit these before providing access (or go back and audit them now). This way you can quickly see what you are dealing with and which computers will be more problematic than others and start to group them based on risk. Mitigate the threats understanding that these are uncharted territories, likely you will need to balance security risk with business continuity.

It is likely that some computers may require anti-virus to be installed to meet your minimum requirement. You can plan this as batch work. You may also decide to add in other O/S updates or applications at the same time to get you past the baseline, or delay for the next phase. Ideally you try to get as close to your SOE as you can given the circumstances.

3. Next steps

There will be many decisions that you will need to make as you enter uncharted territory.

Knowing your risk from the audit results will enable you and the team to make data-based decisions about what you will and won’t allow on the network for a longer-term. In the short term it allows you manage the risk down and advise the business accordingly.

Modern businesses face scores of challenges in the marketplace from competitors, regulators and the ever-changing needs of their customers. But while these challenges are focussed upon as part of daily business, planning for a disaster outside the company’s control can often be ignored.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus has thrown this situation into sharp relief, with global stock markets and many companies and industries severely impacted as authorities struggle to contain the pandemic.

Many businesses are scrambling to keep up with events, struggling to keep their services up. But businesses with strong disaster management plans in place are weathering the storm, empowering their staff to make the changes necessary to allow their operations to continue with minimal disruption.

So just as Winston Churchill is said to have uttered, “never waste a good crisis,” the emergence of this virus and its social impact, is an opportunity to fortify your business.

Disaster management in action

A great response to crisis is the recent action taken by the American investment and financial services firm JPMorgan Chase, which instructed thousands of its employees to work from home for one day.

This test of their business continuity plan (BCP) was designed to test remote access capabilities in the case people had to work from home for extended periods. There are also reports that the company is testing backup trading sites just in case its main trading floors in London and New York are affected by COVID-19. (SOURCE)

Any interruption to JPMorgan Chase’s services could have severe consequences. So these tests are prudent moves, signalling competence to markets while ensuring staff are ready for anything.

But this testing also shows that businesses who don’t have such contingency plans are hostages to events, unable to adapt for a crisis situation.

Creating a strong working network

If a pandemic sweeps through, or an earthquake strikes, even if the power goes out for a prolonged period of time, it’s vital that your business can continue its operations. Behind the scenes it may be a struggle, but to the customer and the rest of the world, it looks like business as usual.

This is where utilising the skills of a Managed Service Provider can pay huge dividends. And allow you to continue what you do best, and that’s running your business.

MSP companies provide services that run your business’ online aspects from an outside location, as a remote IT Department. They can provide a complete service or supplement your existing team with specialist capabilities.

Running a work from home test may result in:

1. Each employee identifying any issues specific to their set-up
2. Checking minimum bandwidth for each employee (ensuring each home connection has the minimum bandwidth)
3. See the impact to infrastructure with the changes in routing and bandwidth utilisation
4. The behaviour of applications

So in the event that a disaster of any kind strikes your business, you will be confident that your infrastructure is reliable and your team is ready for any adjustments to be made. This means your staff can work from home or another location (a diversity site). They will have access to all the tools they need to complete their jobs with confidence, all while meeting the needs of customers and other stakeholders without interruption.

Scalability and resilience

With an MSP handling your key IT functions from an external location, another key consideration is to create the flexibility for your company’s workers to continue their tasks from remote locations.

Whilst this capacity becoming more common in regular working life due to social changes, it’s also an advantageous capability to help your business deal with a disaster.

To make sure this is possible, it’s vital to focus on creating strong broadband links for remote employees, ensuring your company can switch from regular working practises to a distributed network quickly and efficiently.

At a basic level, this involves ensuring your telecommunications network is as modern and reliable as possible, allowing any important communication to be disseminated quickly to your workforce, customers and the community through any digital means.

This is also advantageous because any delays in sending messages could severely impact your business and its ability to adjust to changes quickly.

Crisis situations are of course often very stressful, so it’s also crucial to have resilient and reliable automation capabilities to reduce workload if a disaster strikes, allowing your employees to have more time to focus on solving problems.

A MSP will use robust and scalable network management and monitoring tools that are automation capable. When choosing a MSP, ask about how they can grow with you and how they use automation to meets Service Level Agreements.

Do you have a Business Continuity Plan?

Whilst establishing the ability for remote or alternative working locations and an MSP on deck is a great start for crisis management, it also pays to have a plan for when the unexpected strikes.

A Business Continuity Plan – also known as a BCP – is a vital tool that every modern company should have prepared to enact at a moment’s notice.

A BCP is a blueprint for keeping your business’ day-to-day and long-term services and goals running even in the face of major disruptions, drawing on all of our capabilities and assets to keep things on an even keel.

The BCP also uses up-to-date information about the company and its assets to make decisions about recovery priorities and strategies, ensuring the most important things are dealt with first.

Without an up-to-date BCP tailored exactly to your company’s needs, you could be vulnerable to events outside your control, and if and when they strike, be overwhelmed by them.

This is a major concern because any problem with a company’s services can severely impact its customer base and even threaten its survival. So if you don’t have a BCP, it is best to start the process now.

Creating a BCP for your company

To create a BCP for you company, the first move is usually to conduct what’s called a Business Continuity Impact Analysis.

This process considers a wide range of variables that could affect your business in the event of a disaster, and tests what impact they could have. Everything from financial reporting to customer service is put through its paces, testing for weaknesses and identifying strengths to create a thorough understanding of how your business could perform under severe pressure.

The next step is to create an actionable plan for your employees to follow at every level of the company if a disaster strikes and services are disrupted. This can be done with expert help from outside consultants, and should be made as thorough as possible.

As part of this process, your company should also develop processes to help it recover from a disaster, not just respond to and manage it. While ensuring continuity of service is vital, it’s equally if not more important to create methods of restoring your company’s full abilities.

For example, if there is a major power failure at your office building and all back up generators fail (or run out of fuel), a good BCP would allow for employees to take laptops to outside locations and continue working whilst other employees coordinate efforts to restore the power.

Testing and enacting your capabilities

Whilst having a plan is essential, it’s no guarantee of success.

That’s why testing your BCP is a vital part of the process to ensure any weak points are identified and dealt with, and your employees know what to expect even when the unexpected strikes.

A great way to ensure this happens is to hold a training session with your employees, creating a disaster scenario that allows the activation of the BCP.

You can then track its progress and see if it meets your business’ needs, keeping your operations online and your customers informed and happy.

Preparation is the best protection

The recent emergence of COVID-19 and its global impact has highlighted the importance of being prepared for a disaster.

With a robust and reliable telecommunications network operated by a quality MSP, your company can ensure its operations won’t be disrupted by any unforeseen disasters.

And with an up-to-date BCP that’s regularly tested and trained for, your company will be able to weather any storm that comes its way and even outperform its rivals if they are unprepared.

The dust has finally settled on the new year and as we delve deeper into 2020, new technology trends have already become apparent. So, what are the biggest technology trends set to disrupt the banking and financial industry in 2020? And, what benefits will these technology trends bring? We answer this and more below…

1. AI

AI is a technology trend that is rising in almost every industry, including banking and financial services. Like many industries, banking and financial services are investing in AI to create long-term future savings. For example, one of the most common AI implementations is an AI chatbot. AI chatbots are set to revolutionise customer service by communicating with customers and answering customer queries. This could potentially eliminate the need for a bank to have customer service employees, saving them significant personnel and HR costs.

The popularity of mobile banking has risen in the last few years, as banks have seen the demand from customers to be able to manage their money on-the-go. AI allows 24/7 online banking access for consumers by completing and conducting essential banking operations.

Another of the biggest issues banks and financial businesses face is identifying and preventing fraudulent activity, and fraud detection. AI could disrupt current fraud detection processes by enhancing financial security through its advanced fraud detection capabilities. For all the reasons above, it’s not hard to see why AI is set to disrupt and revolutionise banking and financial services in 2020.

2. Robotic process automation

Robotic process automation, or RPA, similarly to AI, is set to cause disruption to financial and banking services due to its potential to lower operational costs and remove human error. RPA is able to complete repetitive tasks which would previously have to be completed by employees and can be labour intensive. By enabling RPA to complete such tasks, human employees can focus on more skilled work and everyday tasks can be completed much more efficiently without human intervention.

RPA is often more effective as robotic processes do not need to take a break or take holiday days and they can be programmed to complete tasks accurately and efficiently, removing any possibility of error. For example, an insurance company may invest in RPA to speed up its claims process. RPA can screen applications more quickly than a human and then progress or reject claims.

3. Big data

Big data is a large set of data that can be used and analysed to reveal patterns and finance trends, e.g. consumer buying habits. For years, banking and financial services have accumulated big data through monitoring the transactions, transfers and ATM withdrawals of their clients. As they have access to so much data, banking and financial services are investing in business analytics to analyse and safely store their big data. If the financial industry is able to accurately monitor and analyse this data, they could draw actionable insights. For example, with an accurate picture of customer spending habits, fraud will be more easily detectable as anomaly spending can be detected instantly.

Similarly, big data analysis can help identify market and banking trends, allowing financial institutions to make more profitable business decisions, e.g. improved product cross-selling. NMIS (network management information system) can help you handle your data, and ensure you are compliant with data regulations.

4. Cloud computing

Cloud computing is a system that is reliant on shared resources and is an alternative to having local or dedicated servers. Cloud computing technology is used to store data and delivers services such as data analytics, software development and more through an internet connection. Often a business or individual pays for as much cloud storage as they are currently using, as the technology is incredibly scalable. Many banking and financial services are opting for cloud computing in 2020 as it is more cost-effective than using an independent or shared server. As you only pay for the storage you use in cloud computing, controlling outgoing costs is much more easily managed.

Cloud technology is also often more secure than servers, helping banks and other financial companies, such as insurance companies, complete secure online payments and transfers without interference from those with malicious intent. Cloud technology, such as cloud inventory and audit software, can be accessed from anywhere in the world at any time, allowing financial companies to always operate at maximum efficiency.

The above fintech trends are just some of those set to disrupt and improve the workflow of banking and financial services in 2020. If you’re interested in introducing any of these new trends into your business, Opmantek products can integrate and manage new technology with ease, ensuring minimum disruption for your business. If you’d like to learn more about our innovative products, such as our Opmantek Virtual Appliance, a member of our expert team would be happy to get in contact with you.