As the world reels from the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic, health and safety come first – in your home and workplace. We hope you’re safe and following guidelines to keep yourself and your workforce healthy.

Cities and states have issued requests to self-isolate and to close schools and businesses to flatten the curve of the spread of the virus, to protect our healthcare system and our most vulnerable citizens. For those of us in tech, we’re seeing an unprecedented need for data centers and edge facilities to support our lives even more than usual: more people are working from home, and using technology to stay connected with friends and family and entertaining ourselves.

In 2019, about 3.4% of US adults worked from home, about 4.7 million people. With firms big and small sending anyone who can to work from home, millions more are now going online to do their work. And needing to remain connected to their place of business. VPN usage has already increased by 53% in US and 112% in Italy. Connection speed will matter as employees need email at the basic level, and may also need online meeting tools like Zoom and Webex, or telehealth systems for healthcare professionals, to conduct their jobs.

Online game has surged. In Italy, Telecom Italia saw an increase of 70% internet traffic over their landline network, spurred in part by gaming. And we can expect to see these kinds of increases here in the US as states close schools and send children home. Some will be distance learning online. And others, along with their parents and neighbors will be watching tv and movies to stay entertained.

All of this requires working Internet, higher bandwidth, and reliable data centers and edge facilities to deliver these to end users. There is even more at stake now to risk anything but 100% uptime. That’s a lot of pressure for IT teams and data center teams, who are often understaffed at the best of times.

And this makes remote monitoring mission critical.

• To track your assets – know what equipment you have, where it is, and its status (deployed or not, on or off), identify any equipment at the end of its life to replace it if necessary, figure out what non-commissioned equipment you have on hand and identify what you need to purchase
• To understand environmental threats – monitor the temperature, humidity, air flow to identify and mitigate in real time threats to the equipment

We know this is a tough time and that IT teams are stretched thin. Downtime is disastrous for most data centers and edge facilities at the best of times. During this time of a global disaster, we want to help you stay up and running and serving your users 24/7.