Computer Weekly - Businesses must prepare for Swine Flu

Nathan Jackson, Director of Consultancy at NCC Group, discussed with Computer Weekly how remote working technologies will cushion the blow of swine flu absenteeism, but thousands of UK businesses will still be hit severely by the pandemic.

Once again, larger businesses with a good IT infrastructure are expected to cope reasonably well, but for many small to medium-sized companies the threat is great. Smaller organisations typically cannot afford secure virtual private network (VPN) connections with two-factor authentication systems.

Even if organisations have the budget, lead times of up to four months mean it is too late to start putting in these systems now

Jackson said: "There is still not much strategic interest in business continuity planning by UK businesses. Consequently, relatively few smaller UK organisations are in a position to ramp up the number of employees working remotely on short notice."

Jackson says businesses should not delay in identifying exactly what functions are mission critical and drawing up a plan to protect those if absenteeism is high. In many cases, this may be just finding a way of doing some things manually offline until the crisis is over.