How to effectively transfer a large holding to remote work?

When moving to remote work, operability and security of technical systems are particularly important. For this reason, we undertake all necessary actions to ensure continuous operation of IT infrastructure.

Konstantin Koval, Director of IT Infrastructure Center of Expertise, talks about the implementation of solutions that contributed to the successful remote workflows provided by the technical support service.

Our team of experts provides support and development of the entire server and network infrastructure of our customers, as well as a third line of support. This is the highest level of technical support. Therefore, we are responsible for solving the most complex problems. Generally, we deal with requests associated with unavailability of information systems, impossibility to work with servers, and emergency situations. We develop solutions for previously unknown problems, if any, and help specialists at previous support levels.

During the first two weeks of remote work, the team and I worked almost round the clock, providing a sufficient “safety margin”. However, we still did not understand the exact number of users which would need to be transferred to remote work.

Before lockdown, our system was designed for approximately 50 – 100 remote users. Now, the daily number reaches 8,000-9,000 unique users, and we are ready to increase the load. One of the rapid scaling factors was the upfront and proactive increase in our resources. In the course of transition, users could feel some discomfort in the operation of systems that could have worked more slowly than usual. In this situation, you should consider the factor of home provider, which often could not withstand the load and failed. That was a fairly common problem.

Thanks to colleagues from the service department, a manual was developed to describe in detail actions to be undertaken first if the user’s system is slow and what you should pay attention to or how to carry out diagnostics by your own resources. Furthermore, the cloud service culture played a significant role in providing to our users comfortable conditions for their remote work, because a major part of them is concentrated there. We are completing a project aimed at the central Data Centers migration to the cloud infrastructure, so we have released resources of physical servers that were quickly reoriented to the remote work.

Therefore, the centralized infrastructure was unloaded, and all users could observe significant improvements in work.