Sandrine El Khodry, Vice President – MEA, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, explains what they are doing to help businesses operate in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 has changed the way businesses across the globe operate today. While many businesses were in the midst of their Digital Transformation journey, a lot of them were well equipped to handle a remote working approach to maintain Business Continuity. Every organisation operating during these worrying times needs to first focus on preserving the safety and wellbeing of its employees. Businesses need to adapt to a remote working model that allows staff to work from safe locations. To achieve this, businesses need a fully mobile, effective, widely available and easy-to-use technology that safeguards the integrity and security of everyone’s data or personal information.
We recommend that businesses prepare for a new era of doing business based on reliability and efficiency during any circumstance. Businesses need to reinforce their infrastructure to support working from anywhere with a solid and reliable infrastructure. A fundamental solution that businesses need to have is a robust and reliable collaboration platform. The main objective is to safeguard Business Continuity by allowing people to work from anywhere, on any type of device, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
For healthcare institutions treating COVID-19 patients and helping frontline healthcare workers, it is crucial to get assistance in finding patients and equipment in a chaotic environment.
The Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess Stellar Asset Tracking solutions such as the Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess Stellar is particularly important here to help hospitals keep patients and clinicians safe and quickly locate the equipment they need, when they need it. It is an unobtrusive way to keep track of COVID-19 (or any other) patients and with the utmost dignity.
For the education sector, we are focusing on enabling continuity of learning. We are helping institutions create remote learning and collaboration spaces using the ALE, our cloud-based communication and collaboration platform, Rainbow.
For the public services and governments, we are helping by providing simple and effective remote working and collaboration solutions that are easy to deploy and scale to help them remain operational. An immediate solution is to deploy secure plug-and-play platforms that facilitate remote communication, teamwork and video collaboration as well as secure connectivity to your network. An essential longer-term option to ensure services continuity in the future is to work on improving operational procedures today.
From a security standpoint, we recommend a a multi-layered approach to securing the network from the Edge, to the core, using a variety of techniques, including user and device profiles, applications and analytics, operating system hardening and IoT containment.