With October being the official kickoff of the annual flu season, some organizations are taking steps to prepare for a pandemic of the seasonal or avian flu by beefing up communications capabilities and planning for employees to work remotely.
High Rate of Absence Possible
While IT administrators might be inclined to look at preparing for a pandemic much as they would for any other disaster, pandemics are different in several ways, said Steve Bittinger, an analyst at Gartner in Stamford, Conn.
First, pandemics occur over a much longer period of time -- weeks and months compared with the hours and days involved in a natural disaster or terrorist attack -- but this also provides weeks in which to prepare, Bittinger said. Second, they can have a severe impact on employees' attendance and customer purchases either because of sickness, fear of sickness or other limitations such as travel restrictions and quarantines, he said. Bittinger advises organizations to be prepared for absenteeism rates of more than 25 percent if a pandemic strikes.
Telecommuting Policies Will Help
Organizations are preparing for a potential pandemic in different ways. For commercial real estate company Cadillac Fairview in Toronto, the focus this flu season is primarily on how to enable its 1,600 employees to work from home, said Scot Adams, CIO of business innovation and technology services. Adams said his company recently began using MobiKey, a wireless service from Route1, also in Toronto, that allows end users use a Universal Serial Bus device for remote computing.
The product has two components, Adams said. The first component is the MobiKey itself -- a USB device that turns a home computer into a thin client. The other component is a wireless service brokered by Route1. While an end user is connected to his office PC through MobiKey, the computing, applications and data remain behind the corporate firewall. "If we needed to, we could quickly set up a telecommuting policy ... that's easy and affordable for us to turn on quickly," Adams said.
Pricing for the MobiKey product, which supports up to five users, starts at $399 and includes the device and one year of access to the service.
University Pandemic Planning
A number of universities, which are concerned about infectious disease in general because of the large number of people in close proximity, are planning for pandemics as well.
For example, for Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., the focus is primarily on how to deal with the loss of personnel in the short term, long term and possibly forever, said Lawrence Gibbs, associate vice provost for environmental health and safety. The university, which performs disaster planning and disaster recovery tests regularly, has also tested scenarios involving outbreaks from bioterrorism.
"Pandemic planning was not in the realm of planning even a couple of years ago," Gibbs said.
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