COVID-19
In light of the recent outbreak of COVID-19, we wanted to reassure all our customers that we have extensive contingency plans in place to ensure we continue to operate through these difficult times and that both our IT support & website support services will continue as usual over the coming weeks and months.
Update: 26th March 2020
Over the last few weeks, we have been very busy setting up hundreds of VPN connections for our customers to allow as many people as possible to work from home. While we feel that the vast majority of our customers are now setup to work from home, we are receiving a lot of support requests for slow system performance. For this reason, we wanted to explain some of the limitations of remote working together with tips on how to try and improve them.
Your VPN connection establishes a secure (encrypted) link from your home internet connection to your work network via your business internet connection. A VPN will never be as fast as being connected directly to your network as it is routing through two internet connections. The speed of your home connection is an important factor, to help with performance issues, you could make sure you have a strong wireless connection, and so move closer to your router, even better if you can use a network cable to connect directly to your router. If you have other members of your family at home, are they also using the same internet connection? If so, see if you can share it more evenly across the day and try to limit high bandwidth use such as YouTube or streaming services such as Netflix.
Another tip for improving your internet connection would be to restart your router every few days, your connection can slow down over time and a router re-start can help to get the speed back up to its usual level but it’s worth bearing in mind that all internet connections are seeing performance decreases in the region of 20-30%. While not always practical, the best times for using the internet are currently between the hours of 9:00pm and 7:00am.
The other factor to consider is the speed of the internet connection at your place of work and just how many people are using it to connect remotely each day. Asking users to stagger their connection times (or days) can help with this issue. As a general rule, if one or two users are experiencing performance issues, it may be their home internet that’s the issue but if everyone is experiencing slow performance, it’s probably your work connection that’s struggling with capacity.
Should it not be possible for everyone to access systems remotely we can look at moving your server to a Cloud Based solution or installing a Terminal Server at your premises to help reduce the load on your VPN connections. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you would like to chat about the options available to you.
19th March 2020
Telephone numbers, email addresses & our support portal will all operate as normal but we do ask you to bear with us on our response times during this very busy period as everyone gets used to new ways of working.
From early March our team have been working from multiple locations including our offices at Wolverhampton Science Park to limit our exposure and risks. Over 85% of the IT support services we provide are carried out remotely and we will continue to provide this service for everyone. On-site support & installation services are still in operation for the majority of our customers but will be reviewed on a case by case basis with Engineers and individual customers to ensure all risk have been reviewed & minimised.
We are currently helping many of our customers to setup remote working facilities, with the supply, setup & configuration of VPN connections, laptops, VoIP solutions & Cloud Services such as Hosted Desktop & Office365. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if this is something you may need help with.