How is your organization dealing with COVID-19/Coronavirus?

We’ve been doing test runs of people working from home the last few weeks and have everyone working in the office on rotating schedules now. They have added hand sanitizer at every entrance and throughout the offices. They’ve cancelled all lunch and learns and cancelled work travel except for emergencies. They have also put in place a number of VPN upgrades to allow almost everyone to work from home if needed.

We can all work remote. So most started to a week or so ago.


It was announced now, that basically everyone has cart blanche to do so.

I am 100% guaranteed to get it as my wife is a paramedic, so I figure stay at home as long as I can to avoid infecting others.

Thta’s rough @MinnesotaJoe - how is she holding up under the workload and stress?

To her its just another day. They aren’t really “preparing” for anything.


Since there is a mask shortage, they are asked to use the same mask each time and basically just be safe.

When H1N1 came through awhile back she got it from a patient as well. I somehow lucked out and avoided that lol.

Have you had any issues yet keeping the VPN and web gateways up? A friend’s company is struggling pretty badly so far. They have had their VPN tip over a few times already.

On a positive note, compared to previous infectious viruses and bacteria, COVID responds very positively (or negatively, to be more accurate) to soap. Soap and water is actually more efffective against COVID than many infectious diseases.

We’ve done a lot of upgrades and swapped out firewalls for larger capacity firewalls a bit earlier than anticipated. Luckily I work for a larger company that has cash on hand to afford that. Everything is set to HA at the larger offices and we are running multiple VPN tunnels to our Datacenter. Each of our larger sites can support 150 sessions at a time and our Datacenter right now should be able to handle about 1500. Had a few hiccups with some people dropping for a few seconds here and there but not too bad.

My division has migrated the majority of our applications to AWS and Azure and have Okta as our SSO provider for all the other applications. So VPN needs are fairly minimal luckily.


Luckily or unluckily two weeks ago we had an internet outage that caused our connectivity to go up and down every hour at our building which forced me to make preparedness changes for adding a DC in our cloud environment with a connector for syncing our on premise to keep Okta up and running since our DCs are the source of truth.