In this period of rapid transformations due to the spread of covid-19, especially within organisations that have no culture of remote workers, I got myself in a situation where the organisation I work for was not ready for remote work but forced it’s employees to work from home.

What are some of the solutions you have seen succeed in these kind of situations?

communication, communication, communication.. and I don't mean email. Get everybody on slack / hangouts / teams - whatever works for you. Frequent audio and video chats as well.

writing down decisions and when needed how they came about (links to meeting notes or whatever) in tickets that move development forward has been helpful personally.

The organisation I currently work for is an enterprise that has shielded of all external connections in multiple layers of firewalls and network segregations where the approved communication tool is MS Teams, Sharepoint (only accessible from inside network) and E-mail.

I've never seen that before (just kidding! this is more the norm than not)

@james.heimbuck oh, that’s a nice reference. Thank you for sharing

but then as I always say - never let a good crisis go to waste!

see how much you can use this to (securely) open up those tools to be accessible outside the network.

Do you have remote access to your machines?

@raj already started the discussion about VPN access, even on pool devices or via a Citrix session, but the earliest I got it on the agenda was 2021

@aniella nope, not even within the network. Only through allowed devices

A suggestion is to organize a short phone meeting with your peers (because of the limitations if you can video Skype, it would be best) to discuss what they are going to do with their teams? The idea is to share and form a great way to go forward. Then execute and then share again to refine.

Teams should be accessible remotely without a VPN. access can be locked down to managed devices and further secured with MFA if necessary.

This makes the COVID-19 not only a threat, but also an opportunity to prove remote working is a feasible option.

@david.c.blanchet yes, I was thinking along those lines by taking baby-steps to see what works and what doesn’t early in the process.

agree with @david.c.blanchet re starting the conversationw ith your peers

and I have all the support from the digital teams (dev, ops, sec, qa, and so on)

I just need to find solutions that would help us move forward without stepping too hard on the toes of those who are keepers of the keys (political plays are real)

One victory I already had was having Skype for business to be accepted as an officially allowed tool as it can be considered part of MS Teams (which was already allowed).

I have had good experiences with bringing peers together in a crisis. Lots of innovative thinking happens, and you might find some way to bring in better ways to communicate once you are all back in the office. This should be exciting for you and your peers. Good luck! I am here if you would like to discuss.

Another victory I had was to allow internal Jenkins build to be triggered by external Bitbucket webhooks, even though we had to set up an application gateway at the DMZ to control access. But it’s a win

@david.c.blanchet much appreciated

My goal is to make everyone in the organisation as effective as possible, no matter if they are in or outside company network.

and I have the backing of my peers and some business sponsorship

I will come back to the dockside to provide updates on the progress we’re making. As @raj said: we cannot let a good crisis go to waste 😄

Humn, I would gather the network team and create a vlan for the desktops and allow access to them only with specific firewall rules that allow external connections . Keeping the other machines (servers, prod env ) segregated from this group

Redesigning the network together with the security team may be a good solution but I don’t know the specifics of your context.