Actions to be taken
Even though most providers have made it possible for their employees to work from home, tech leaders need to monitor employees’ productivity and their ability to work in real-time.
Make sure your provider can scale up the following key enablers:
- operational protocols (roles and responsibilities, decision-making authority, problem management);
processes (communications, document flow); - technology (virtual private network [VPN], network bandwidth, collaboration tools, video conferencing, security);
- people management (health tracking and support)
Organize daily phone calls with your outsourcing providers until the new working model proves itself.
Plan for capacity rebalancing with your outsourcing partner
Work with your supplier to understand current capacity and plan for the future impact of any performance degradation. For example, infrastructure-backed performance is expected to suffer a 40% to 50% drop due to the lack of remote infrastructure availability.
Develop and implement possible rebalancing plans between locations and/or providers. Encourage your supplier to provide early warning of affected resources and services.
Ensure continuity of critical software development and infrastructure services outsourcing
Create a detailed daily plan with your outsourcing vendors to monitor, resolve, and track events related to data centers, critical servers, and network support, taking into account both increased network usage and reduced productivity for both customers and vendor staff.
Set up and validate the correct offshore security protocols
It is essential to ensure that all provider employees protect and process all data, especially personal information (PII), correctly, even in remote locations.
Tech decision-makers must ensure that providers have secure remote work protocols and procedures in place to identify and escalate threats. Consider, for example, using multi-factor authentication to reduce the risk of accessing sensitive data and working with vendors to shorten patch cycles for essential home-based systems such as VPNs and endpoint security to minimize the risk of data being stored on endpoints with latency.
Reduce non-critical and short-term resource usage to ease the burden
While most outsourced providers operate at full capacity without a significant drop in service levels, they are likely to experience under-capacity due to a lack of resources. Make sure the available bandwidth is used wisely.
Re-evaluate all applications for true criticality and 24/7 support, reduce SLAs for non-priority tickets, etc.