How to reach home: volcano rules for remote connections

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

The cruellest game to play in Disaster Recovery is hindsight. If you had carefully crafted your business continuity plan to accommodate attacks on Manhattan, then the London attacks – in which the cellphone networks were shut down for hours at a time – would have made a prize mess of your notion to alert staff to BC decisions by text message.

Then you accommodate that problem, and the next disaster is a suicide ram-raid at Glasgow Airport. So you factor that issue in… only to find that the next problem is a volcano. Of all the words I never expected to type in a PC Pro blog, “Volcano” is a favourite – and I’m not even going to make a Bjork of myself trying to spell the name of the red hot steam-filled sulphurous hole in question.

However; as Tim Danton has pointed out more than once, I have some relevant experience to offer, because I have been banging around Europe – mostly by car – for the past decade. If you are trying to get critical workers online from unfamiliar locations and methods, here’s the benefit of a few attempts to do the wrong thing the right way, from foreign fields.

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Remote working in the real world

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Despite the fact there’s no way I’ll be able to work at home for years (anyone who’s got young children will know exactly what I mean), I’m absurdly fascinated by home working – to the extent that I’ve started drafting some notes for a book on the subject. (Any browsing book publishers, feel free to email me large cheques now.)

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