A recent national news story aptly summed up the situation for vendors and managers service providers:

“Technology companies operating in Canada and specializing in remote work say they’re bracing for a spike in inquiries, sales and users amid an outbreak of a novel coronavirus.”

“Canada” in that quote could just as easily be swapped out for “U.S” or any number of other countries. Within a matter of days, “business as usual” had faded to a memory for many organizations.

Those that can are shifting operations, and people, off site. From the small business, to the multinational and the government department, it’s suddenly become widely acceptable to be working from home in your PJs.

If you are an MSP, we fully understand the pressure this is putting on your team. Your clients need help to quickly adjust from a traditional office environment to supporting a now dispersed team that still has a job to do. From VPNs to remote desktops and figuring out the issues with that cloud-based collaboration software, businesses large and small need to get their people securely and reliably connected.

This other article, for example, notes an almost 600 per cent surge in overall sales since March 11 for one top VPN provider (as of March 24). IT professionals, on average, are working an extra three hours a day in the U.S., and an extra two hours in Canada and parts of Europe, to keep up.

You are the vital partner these businesses are relying on to keep them going at time when we can’t predict when life may return to some semblance of normal. Many of your clients are likely smaller businesses that can’t afford a long-term disruption of regular operations if they hope to survive. They need your help to achieve a viable “new normal.”

Given these uncertain times, it’s reasonable to expect that the priority of your business has shifted. If your objective for the current quarter or the fiscal year a month ago was around revenue growth, the priority now may simply be ensuring you can meet that surge in demand. Instead of being concerned with how to upsell clients on new services, you now find yourself wishing only for an extra hour in the day to handle what’s already on your plate.

The priority has become time savings and efficiency – what can you do, what should you do, to accelerate and streamline your ability to respond and deliver on your client’s needs?

If you are delivering private cloud services, there are options – tools that you can use that will enable your team to do more, faster. You may not be able to add more hours to a day, but you can certainly empower your team to accomplish more in the time they do have.

HyAlto is here to help, in any way that we can. We may not be able to address that increased demand for remote desktops, but we can help you save time and resources in how you deliver private cloud services. Whatever resources you can free up in one area of your business can be redeployed elsewhere, to ensure your clients continue to have what they need, when they need it.

We are all in uncharted territory. Be kind to yourselves, support your community of employees/customers/friends/family with social distancing, and be diligent about the little things that matter – like proper hand-washing. It’s the choices that we each make day to day that will determine how quickly we all get through this.