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With the recent furor over bird flu, many companies -- including my employer -- have been revisiting their disaster recovery plans to consider what they would do to maintain business continuity during a pandemic situation.

The general consensus is that in a pandemic situation, there would likely be a state of emergency declared and "nonessential" workers would be asked by the government to stay home (where "asked," as is customary for government, means "forced.") So what does a company do to continue operating when all of its workers have been declared "nonessential" and can't come to work?  Why, they just have everyone telecommute, of course!

Or so they believe.  There's nothing like a disaster recovery exercise to show how technically unprepared companies are for a large number of remote workers.  The technology is available, but companies don't have the infrastructure to handle everyone using it at once, and for the most part, they've never considered this.

Here's an example: a company has 3,200 people set up to work remotely.  A VPN infrastructure is in place, and these people routinely connect via a secure tunnel, using a secure authentication method, and work from home or other locations.  Sounds like they're well-prepared for a pandemic situation at corporate headquarters.

But... how many of those people can connect at one time?  Supporting 3,200 total users is very different from supporting 3,200 concurrent users -- a userbase that size may require a VPN concentrator that supports only 100-500 people at a time.  In addition to the concentrator, though, there are a lot of other parts of a remote-access infrastructure that need to be considered.  Is the network backbone able to handle the full number of remote users connected at once using relatively high-bandwidth technologies like Remote Desktop?  Are terminal servers used for remote access, and if so, can they handle that many simultaneous users?  How many sessions are licensed for these terminal servers?  Often, companies have only paid Microsoft for so many terminal server users, even if they have the technological capability to handle more.  Can the help desk support all the calls that would come in from people who haven't used remote access in two years and are suddenly expected to do all their work that way?  Can help desk support them when the help desk employees are also stuck at home for the same pandemic situation?

Part of being prepared for a situation like this for a company involves not just verifying the infrastructure, but also verifying that everyone who in theory can remote in has actually tried it.  When the help desk is closed and people can't come in to work is not the time to discover that half the support staff has no idea how to use the VPN client, and another 15% of them have expired passwords or smart cards or tokens.

Any large increase in telecommuting could require upgrades and preparation work of this type, but a pandemic could force companies to do so in a rather sudden manner -- and pandemic preparation may cause companies to do such work in advance (indeed, as a secuirity architect involvement in such preparation is part of my job.)

While I certainly hope that a disease pandemic doesn't actually come to pass, I can't help but be curious as to what the effect it would have on the work environment would be.  I can see two likely outcomes (both of which would likely happen to varying degrees):

• Some employees, after telecommuting for a week or two, would discover that they are every bit as capable of performing their jobs from home as at work.  This could greatly increase the demand for alternative working arrangements, as some people discover that they like such an arrangement.  Of course, it wouldn't be for everyone -- many people would be eager to get back to the office, foreign as that concept is to me.
• Managers faced with the sudden absence of many of their employees might find out that far from needing all of them at the office, they don't need all of them at all.  I wouldn't be surprised to see several employees being quietly let go in the months after a disaster scenario as the company discovered that they can do without them.  (This, by the way, is one reason why some people advise against taking any vacation longer than a week.)

In any case, having an infrastrucutre in place for extensive telecommuting can only be a good thing for those of us who want out of the office environment, regardless of the rationale for implementing it in the first place.

Posted by Grant at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For decades now, city planners have been decrying "urban sprawl" and the decreasing density of our cities.  This brings with it a host of problems, such as increased commuting times, pollution, loss of undeveloped wilderness area, etc.  But primarily, I think these city planners just hate suburbs -- they find them unsightly and not in keeping with their preferred aesthetics, the dense urban city and the unpopulated outdoors.

Of course, the problem they always run into is that people love to live in suburbs, and Americans by and large still want a house with a yard.  This Newsweek article shows that people are starting to accept this.  City planners have been fighting a losing battle -- instead of trying to get people to live in dense areas they don't want to, perhaps they should instead embrace the medium-density cities people want (i.e. suburbs) and make that environment better.  The article comments thatEuropeans  -- whose cities are held out by these "smart-growth" anti-sprawl city planners as the ideal -- who come to America are delighted by suburbs, and often aspire to own their own home, which is impossible back home.  (By way of comparison, more than half the apartments in Paris are under 46 square meters -- about 550 square feet for we Americans -- and sell for over 6,000 Euro per square meter.  Here, college students have more space than that.)  Of course, in a sense, much of Europe is low-density suburb, they just explain it away by not considering it part of the small, dense cities at all.

The article considers accepting suburbs to mean bringing the arts and businesses to those suburbs, thus making more of what people want available without coming into the city.  However, there's one thing missing from this calculus -- most of the jobs are still in the city, and suburban living involves increasingly long commutes.

This other article -- from the same issue of Newsweek, no less --  is a great example of the fact that accepting suburbs has only come so far.  The "fastest-growing group of commuters" (whatever that means) is now those who commute more than 90 minutes each way.  Americans order a quarter of their restaurant meals from their cars, and eat 32 meals a year while driving.  McDonald's is selling food that fits in your cupholder now, and car manufacturers are giving you more of them (three for the driver alone in some vehicles.)  The Dodge Caliber includes a refrigerator in the glove box and a passenger seat that folds down into a dining table.

On one hand, this may seem like accepting people's preferred living arrangements by making the commute less painful.  But it's not really --  truly accepting where people want to live would mean not making everyone drive into the city.  It's strange that at the same time as people are talking about "work/life balance" and rebeling against 60+ hour workweeks, they're adding 15 hours to their workweek by spending it in their cars.  Consider how much unproductive time is wasted.

Telecommuting is one way to eliminate this, but it's not the only way.  Another would be reducing the emphasis on downtown prestige offices.  Why does a company need to put all its employees in a monolithic office in a skyscraper?  How often to they need to communicate to each other in person, rather than by email and phone?  The answer of course varies by company and type of employee.  However, at my current employer, all the IT people are in four floors of one building, with a very small support staff (two HR folks, a couple receptionists, and some purchasing reps), while other corporate functions are in entirely different buildings.  There's no reason that any of those buildings need to be located downtown.  There's the occasional meeting from those of us in one building with those of us in another... but they're only occasional.

Many companies are like that, having semi-isolated "silos" that are located together either because "they always have been" or just to give the company a desirable downtown address.  My question is, what's so desirable about a downtown address?

Living in the suburbs of Seattle, I've seen what a livable suburb can be.  When I didn't work downtown, I could go for months without making the 25-minute drive into the city -- there are enough businesses and employers in the suburbs as to make it unnecessary.  Despite this, the Seattle area truly lives up to its name as the "Emerald City" when you get out of the city proper -- there are so many trees and green spaces as to make a beautiful living environment.  Of course, just as the cities try to "fight sprawl" and make themselves more dense and urban, the suburbs have their own form of inanity -- regulations to limit the height of buildings and to drive out businesses so as to retain their "rural character."  Still, a balanced, medium-density community can work, and seems to be what most people want to live in.  Anything that reduces how many people have to spend 90 minutes on a highway every morning is a step in the right direction.

Posted by Grant at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)