How to prepare your systems for remote work with Chuck Egerter of Guardian Eagle

The St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce presents: Coronavirus Impact Insights

On this episode of Chamber Coronavirus Impact Insights, Chuck Egerter, founder and CEO of Guardian Eagle, joins Chris Steinocher, CEO of the St. Petersburg Chamber and Joe Hamilton, Publisher of the St. Pete Catalyst, to discuss how companies large and small can prepare and transition their systems to allow for remote work.

Guardian Eagle, formerly Eagle Datagistics, was founded in 2003. Guardian Eagle primarily works on architecting, developing and maintaining large, complex database environments, like Oracle or Microsoft, where small, medium and large businesses store the data that their critical applications need to function.

Egerter advises planning and preparing critical systems and applications now, even in the midst of the crisis. Because the Covid-19 situation is fluid, Egerter explains that businesses should be prepared for mitigation efforts to become more stringent and things to get worse.

He suggests starting with an inventory of critical applications for employees to access while working remotely. Questions to ask include: Where is the data for those systems now? Is it backed up? Who needs to access it? What other systems interface with this system?

If some of those critical systems are not securely available to employees remotely, Egerter says that now is the time to assess why they’re not, and make sure that they can be made available in the future, whether that means migrating it to the Cloud or making it available remotely via a virtual private network (VPN) accessible only by employees.

“We should be conscious that this is not possibly the worst of what we will see,” Egerter explains. “We should be careful not to settle into this as the new routine. There’s still time to prepare for other things that we might not be expecting.

“What happens today could be completely different from what happens two weeks from now,” Egerter says. It’s important to understand how your businesses’ systems are backed up, and ideally that businesses are not just backing up systems, but putting together real-time data replication systems.

“So instead of restoring a critical system from a backup, [the system would be] failing over to a version of it that has been up and running and in sync with you primary the entire time,” Egerter explained. “It’s not too late to put those things in place.”

Egerter also suggests looking into whether the company already has access to programs like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Anyone with Microsoft Office 365 has access to both Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint.

Guardian Eagle put together a list of resources for businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s available here: theguardianeagle.com/Covid19