Mitigating Reactive Technology in Times of Crisis

With Government restrictions and recommendations now in full effect, many organisations have now begun encouraging their staff to work from home. While this is a fantastic move for the economy and for keeping businesses open and staff in jobs, it poses a new plethora of risks and issues to the businesses involved.

Staff working from home often means a rise in shadow IT for organisations is imminent. Shadow IT happens when staff feel that there are systems missing that they require, and that their company’s IT department cannot support what users want. But this doesn’t have to be the case. We know that maintaining governance once staff are outside the office is difficult, particularly if the organisations staff do not really understand the businesses processes.  Often, when staff run into issues, they will attempt to fix these problems themselves; regardless of company governance and guidelines. Sometimes this may come from a lack of knowledge of the procedures, or sometimes it may come from a want within a staff member to be proactive and put their own fix in place. Either way, the more staff who put their own fixes in place, the more problems it causes long term for your business, and more specifically your IT department as the scope of which they need to cover, and fix grows rapidly.

While we know that shadow IT causes organisations the large issues of ungoverned and uncontrolled solutions being implemented for collaboration, information management and a multitude of other tasks, it is another thing entirely to know how best to reduce, and more hopefully stop it from happening. This is where we come in.

Here at Myriad, we are very familiar with organisations in this position. We have a proven track record of helping organisations maintain governance through:

• Implementation of great controls within organisational systems such as Document Management Systems, SharePoint etc.

• Deployment of monitoring programs to assist in monitoring and control of what employees are accessing.

• Maintenance and control of business systems with ongoing desktop monitoring and support for your employees with our Myriad Services team.

We are backed by 14+ years of experience in helping businesses solve these challenges and are here and ready to discuss any questions or problems you may have or want to solve.

To find out more information or discuss any plans you may have to move to the cloud, contact us for an obligation-free conversation today.

Planning, Managing and Mopping up from an Epidemic, Pandemic or Other Emergencies

From the perspective of integrated planning and management of a crisis event, COVID-19 has caught a great many government agencies and Defence forces with their pants down. Their technology and systems readiness have been acutely tested, and the approaches used by many government agencies to date have largely failed. The technology and organisational responses have been haphazard and to put it in the nicest possible way, disorganised.

This is really a crying shame as the time for planning and executing responses is well before the emergency is upon us. Many agencies have simply relied on traditional IT approaches to be able to function and operate during times of crisis, and these traditional solutions have fallen well short of the mark.

For Australia and the world, this year with the multiple crisis’ we have already faced such as bushfires, floods and COVID-19 has illustrated the definite need for IT systems to be able to support a broad range of ‘anything but normal’ conditions.

For unclassified workloads, Microsoft Office 365 and especially Teams©, SharePoint© and Microsoft Outlook© represent a powerful combination to address some of the challenges of dealing with emergency situations.

For classified workloads including restricted/protected, secret and top secret, the choices are far more limited. The great news is, if you need an advanced, Command and Control support system underpinned by a modern architecture, including advanced jump to search. Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) data management capabilities, then Secure Search and Information Exchange (S2IX) is an incredibly powerful and versatile, not to mention Defence tested and accredited platform that can solve a wide range of challenges, including;

• Support for collaboration and planning at all levels, from strategic to tactical.

• Mission management and execution support, across all areas of operations.

• Data ingestion, aggregation, analysis and visualisation.

• Highly secure data exchange across classification levels and security domains

• Fully integrated business process management, including automation and orchestration.

• Standard and advanced search of all data holdings.

• Full support for Government grade information classifications of documents and data, including releasability, classification and caveat management.

Through modern containerised and virtualised methods, S2IX can support your mission, operation or inter-agency collaboration, both in an operational headquarters and also in theatre. Its unique architecture and approach to challenging networks (S2IX operates over any network, regardless of how good or bad the connection) allows S2IX to continue processing, on a ship, in a vehicle or in a data centre.

With their latest partner Blackned, S2IX can now also provide instant messaging and chat, click to voice and click to video on modern smartphones, automatically bridging your information back into S2IX platform to integrate all your data across the area of operation. We can harmonise any existing waveform you have and leverage that in a crypto-safe manner.

S2IX is available in cloud through the Azure marketplace and can be deployed in the Australian Central Data Center which is classified for up to protected for instances where government agencies require higher levels of data and information classification. S2IX is available in deployable cloud formats, including Azure Stack and Azure Databox Edge. For higher level classifications, S2IX functions on all modern hypervisors allowing deployments for secret and top-secret environments.

To learn more about how S2IX can help government and defence bodies during times of crisis and pandemics, click here.

For more information, feel free to contact us or visit the S2IX website. We can arrange a full demonstration of managing an epidemic leveraging S2IX platform. This can be done remotely as an online session.

Crisis Communications with Microsoft

In times of crisis, providing up to date, concise and timely communications to staff becomes a high priority to most organisations. Achieving this is not always as simple a task as we may think, especially with more and more staff working remotely and disconnected from the day to day of the office. Ensuring that all staff are notified and kept updated of what is important and ensuring critical updates from the business are seen and consumed by all is essential.  The messages can become disjointed and diluted when shared by word of mouth, and in a worst-case scenario completely missed by your staff.

Recently Microsoft and a team of developers have created and released a Crisis Management Solution Template using the tools available in Office 365 in under 48 hours. Critical communications become available via a web browser (SharePoint Online), PowerApps and Teams allowes businesses and employees to rapidly and effectively communicate as any situation develops.

Employees can report whether they are working from home or out of the office and make requests to colleagues. This information is designed to help managers and central response teams to co-ordinate any action that’s needed.

The solution also allows business to deliver communications via push notifications to mobile devices and provide information from external organisations via RSS feeds. Emergency contacts for specific locations can also be captured and shared out across your business.

In response to the current global crisis, Microsoft has made the Power Automate push notification action free for all users, meaning the solution can be deployed to any current Office 365 licensed organisation without incurring additional fees for using what was previously a premium feature.*

At Myriad we want to help you to be prepared and support you and your staff. We are available to assist in implementing this solution in your existing Office 365 platform, and work with internal teams to provide configuration, training and support of the features (or any combination of the above) to help you be in the best possible position.

To find out more information or discuss any plans you may have to move to the cloud, contact us for an obligation-free conversation today.

* Minimum licensing required is SharePoint online for web use. PowerApps and Power Automate required for mobile use.

Staying Connected in a Remote Working World

A traditional working space is something we are all familiar with – a company has a set location where it sets up office, which is filled with employees working from their own spaces within the office. The traditional working space for most organisations may also include meeting rooms and collaboration spaces for employees to be able to host meetings and work together as a team.

Over time, the idea of what constitutes as a working space for employees has changed, as has the technology to support it. The requirement for employees to work externally from the office has grown drastically in recent times with more people working remotely. This has presented a multitude of challenges for organisations, such as the ability to communicate and collaborate, manage staff and maintain business continuity over dispersed locations, where face-to-face communication methods are unavailable.

Microsoft Teams offers its users an advanced technological solution to these challenges, while being designed in a clear manner with user experience in mind. While there are many benefits to making the switch to teams, some of the main benefits we find our customers enjoying including:

• Productivity gains and enriched communication

• Better focus on your work

• Increased transparency and collaboration

• Seamless move to one of the foundations for a digital workplace

• New team members can more quickly get up to speed

• Enabling staff to work remotely

While these benefits alone will greatly improve the ability for companies to successfully have their employees work remotely while the running of the business remain business as usual, Microsoft makes the decision to move your organisation to Teams even easier. Microsoft Teams is available, license free, for up to 300 people within organisations. This means, that up to 300 of your staff can enjoy:

• Unlimited chat messages and search

• Built-in audio and video calling for individuals

• Groups and full team meetups

• Integration with the rest of the Office 365 suite

• The ability to communicate and collaborate with anyone inside or outside your organisation

• A secure platform backed by Microsoft’s global infrastructure.

Sounds like something that could make your world easier? Here at Myriad, we are ready to make your move to Teams even simpler. We are able to fully install and configure teams for your organisation, as well as help onboard your staff with one-on-one training and included reference guides for future questions. We have seen many organisations benefit from the move to Teams and would love to help you transition to this powerful communication tool.

To find out more information or discuss any plans you may have to move to the cloud, contact us for an obligation-free conversation today.

How do you Deal with Being Disconnected?

Over the last few weeks, there have been some massive changes in our world. With the Government encouraging organisations to have their staff work from home, combined with the recent closure of many workplaces, this is causing a strain on residential networks. For many households, bandwidth is starting to become a rarity.

The good news is that service providers are trying to combat this issue with free extra data being provided on many services, including mobile devices (you can find all telecommunication companies assistance packages here). While these measures are helping a little, the more people that are working from home increases the unreliability of both fixed and mobile connections.

For those who are trying to work from home during the day, this bandwidth issue is starting to become painful, and has the potential to get worse. The good news is, loss of bandwidth does not have to mean inability to work. The question at this point is, how can we continue to access business data and information without a stable and reliable connection?

There are several services available that will allow you to take content offline for when you don’t have a stable connection, and it will sync back up to the cloud when network becomes available again. A great set of systems available to business customers that will help employees have this happen automatically are SharePoint Online and OneDrive. Taking this a step further, combining these with tools such as Nintex will also allow organisations to take their forms and workflow tasks offline. We also highly recommend the use of Microsoft Teams to keep businesses connected during the times of intermittent network issues.

Here at Myriad, we have a multitude of SME’s who are ready and able to help you move to the cloud, making your documents available from any location, both while your connected or disconnected. Some of the ways we can help includes:

• Migrating your data to the cloud.

• Creating a structure in SharePoint for your data, and help you move from other file shares to SharePoint.

• Training your employees on how to use OneDrive, including how to synchronise documents to your desktop.

• Helping establish good governance and policies for managing data when remote working.

• Onboarding and training of your staff on how to best use Microsoft Teams for online meetings.

To find out more information or discuss any plans you may have to move to the cloud, contact us for an obligation-free conversation today.