With Covid-19 wreaking havoc on business and the economy, the only ideal solution is to respect Government guidelines while continuing business as usual — from home.
The problem is, how can an organisation, in particular a financial institution, give hundreds or thousands of employees secure access to the documents and applications required to work from home without disruption to service?
As COVID-19 pushes clients to the limit, cloud technology is enabling remote working at scale — a paramount element of business continuity.
Storm Reply, the Reply Group’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner Company since 2014, has never been busier. Storm Reply leverages AWS capabilities to ensure our clients’ staff can continue to access business application services and end-user computing resources to minimise disruption.
Storm Reply has been a Premier Consulting Partner Company for Amazon Web Services since 2014
In early March, soon after the WHO escalated the risk assessment of Covid-19 to “very high” and the coronavirus morphed into a pandemic, ‘S.W.A.T.’ teams from Reply’ers embarked on a time-critical mission to provide one of our clients 300 secure virtual workstations.
’s Storm Reply team leveraged Amazon WorkSpaces — a managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution — to provision Windows 10 virtual desktops in a matter of hours to our client’s employees across regions in lockdown.
By the end of the very same day, employees had regained access to every application they would normally access via Notebooks, Macs and Tablets. To facilitate the almost-immediate move from office to home, the Reply’ers created a VPN connection with on-premise services and active directory. The secure Cloud desktops were live. This created continuity of access and productivity with minimal downtime.
Marco Noli, Partner at Storm Reply
As some of you may know, I have started working on a financial service industry-wide thought leadership research paper with Professor Nelson Phillips of Imperial College, London. As unfortunate as the circumstances surrounding COVID-19 are, it provides a unique window into the potential of the Cloud that would be irresponsible to ignore. For that reason, it is something that we will continue to explore over the next few weeks. For Marco’s client, and the specific case of immediate deployment of secure virtual workstations, the Cloud means:
For this client, it means that, as far as one can reasonably expect, business continues as usual.
For financial institutions that are in the process of implementing remote working capabilities, do not hesitate to reach out to for help with Amazon Web Services.
Alternatively, should you have a preference for another Cloud provider, I am happy to direct you to the Partner in charge of the respective Reply companies specializing in Microsoft Azure or GCP.