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With COVID-19 fear how can we achieve work at home before its too late?

We live in a technologically advancing world. Lot of technologies that people did not take seriously has become a part of our daily life. One such technology so promising yet so negatively received by stakeholders in the Maldives is cloud computing. Cloud computing is no longer just a dream technology, it is a very practical solution. Companies are willing to take cloud computing's full potential.

Today we are also talking about a serious issue. How to continue office work at home while exposed to the potential dangers of the new virus outbreak? NCIT is working hard to orchestrate a plan to facilitate civil service workers to embrace work at home strategies. But without proper cloud computing implementation that would be a really hard thing to achieve.
If we depend on our local resources, work at home becomes more difficult to achieve. So how can we take the initial first steps?

Taking efficient steps are very important. Some organisations are using hosted gmail services and then buying Microsoft office products, this could be just an extra cost. Instead of doing this an office 365 plan would be more cost efficient and a better choice, if Microsoft office products are a must to use.

If NCIT would like to implement a fast-pace strategy to initiate work at home, a very fist step is to consider the office 365 option. But that requires, giving every organization to select the plan for themselves. The real benefits of office 365 comes when each organisation can use them independently. That means the emails will be hosted in outlook, each user will get 1TB of storage, organisations can utilize the share-point online sites to organize file shares without the need for local file storage in servers. However, if local file sync is a must, the Azure active-directory option is open too, so keeping a local file available can be achieved.

Internet without a doubt would become an issue, but, with proper legal measures service providers could provide a sustainable minimum bandwidth that could rectify this problem.

In case the internet for the whole country is down, that is a different scenario. As a country internet backup links could be arranged via purchased backup satellite links as well.

Why I am talking about office 365? Well because all of the civil service institutions rely on Microsoft office products to do their document processing work with Ms word and Ms excel, etc. So the question is who can employees get access to the work files and continue working and have a proper backup on cloud all the time, the answer comes with office 365 plans as it provides emails plus office suite and 1TB of storage per email address, which the office 365 administrators of respected organisation can manage and together with the provided Share-point-online, if willing, an institution could go on without ever needing to keep physical servers and file shares and the entire infrastructure. Some have show this is possible with the internet available in the Maldives. And the first institution that comes to my mind is the Maldives pension administration office. They have their entire infrastructure in google cloud storage. Even if all employees have to work from home today onward they can do it because of having a total cloud infrastructure.

If office 365 has been already approved and all civil service institutions are already using them, formulating a work at home strategy would be easy and practically feasible. Service providers could provide temporary crisis data packages that allow free access to office 365 services hence, most of the civil service workers could easily work from home. But none of these in place, when we are talking about a work at home policy, then the reality seems very far away.
We can now read about how China contained the situation and some major part was played by technology. People were able to use online services even to deliver medical supplies as well. People were able to chat with doctors and get an online prescription. With Aasandha having their own technical capability, users using an Aasandha app and receiving prescriptions online and ordering them by sending to available pharmacies could be easily implemented with the correct mind-set.
Even if, there is no office 365, if people can access GEMS with an internet connection and SAP is also cloud hosted the whole nation going online is still possible. People still could use emails and finish tasks and send each other via temporary social media applications, but at least a policy is needed.
When we are talking about emails, most of the government institutions do not have efficient email services, emails have to be configured in a Desktop and when office is closed, checking an email would not be easy for many institutions. Apart from that the common inboxes would not have more 500MB for a mail box.
Even without formal cloud computing implementations, a willingness in providing services could really result in providing the functioning of the nation with whatever available social media application, but the only thing we need right now is a good and comprehensive but simple to follow policy. If people have to learn a new platform and then start using a newly created service, with the on going crisis things would get over complicated exponentially.

So simple, yet usable alternative is required. All we need is internet connection and the rest is just few choices away.

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