Logicalis Services 2020 COVID19 Pandemic Response

How Logicalis U.S. Keeps Employees Safe While Continuing to Provide Services to Customers

Challenges
Logicalis U.S. has a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place for interruptions or unavailability by leveraging a multi region, multi location strategy that provides automatic failover from location to location a sufficient response for most events. But the plan did not account for the direst of situations in which services teams across all locations would be impacted simultaneously.

To maintain a full level of 24x7 services to its customers, Logicalis needed to enable its Service Desk agents and Managed Services team some 270 individuals across three locations to work remotely. And it needed to be completed fast, in three weeks or less.

But then the unthinkable occurred. The World Health Organization declared COVID 19 a pandemic, accelerating the move to remote operations to just two weeks and beginning a frenzied race with the clock.

The Solution
Recognizing the serious challenges at hand, Logicalis’ leadership team and the IT team met to consider all options, including re architecting the solution. The team outlined a solution that would:

• Enable services teams to have a seamless work environment between their office and home.
• Provide a secure connection that protected both Logicalis’ and its customers’ systems.
• Connect services teams to the Logicalis contact center system to take customer calls.

In addition, the Logicalis IT team and Managed Services team had just under two days to develop an immediately executable plan to ensure that a viable secure solution could be implemented to provide seamless simultaneous access to all corporate and customer resources.

On March 13, the environment was ready multiple cloud solutions combined with security measures, including MFA and DUO, along with many other technologies and business process implementations needed to create the appropriate environment.

Then came the announcement that all Logicalis employees could work remotely beginning on Monday, March 16. The team jumped into high gear to ready the solution a week earlier than planned. Testing and validation of all customer connections was performed over the weekend.

Best Practices for Success
This was a complex solution involving multiple teams, an already short timeline that was cut even shorter, and multiple remote connections. Fortunately, already having a DR plan in place and getting an early start on additional planning and preparation made all the difference.

Communication throughout this 2 week process was also key as news was changing by the hour. Service desk leadership kept the teams focused and informed as needed:

• An initial email went to the Service Desk leadership team to aggregate all questions, concerns, and communications to limit misinformation and miscommunication.
• Daily email updates to Service Desk agents described what was happening in the background and prepared them for the possibility of working from home.
• An email communication with documentation was sent to every agent on March 9, asking
  them to test their phone connectivity from home and report results to their respective managers so that issues could be resolved.
• Daily updates following March 9 continued to inform the team of next steps, planning,
  timing, expectations, etc.

At the same time, the Service Desk leadership team built documentation, FAQs, and videos to quickly ramp up agents on how to connect to the phone system and customer environments. This information was sent to agents over the weekend so they could get set up and be ready to answer customer calls on March 16.

Next Steps
This scenario creates a unique opportunity to capitalize on a true test environment and case study using 100% percent remote workforce scenarios. The short timeframe allows for true data collection executed in a non biased implementation. Logicalis will leverage this opportunity to collect and assess this data, for provision internally and externally, to share the opportunity for remote capabilities in this industry.

Results
By Monday, March 16 in just two weeks and a week earlier than originally planned all connections, customer connections, and the phone/contact center system were working successfully, and customers’ issues were being addressed.