Coronavirus/COVID-19: Importance of Cloud-Empowered Remote Work Capability

Having the right tools for CPA firm employees to work from home and stay productive has gone from a luxury to a business survival necessity in the blink of an eye, especially in the heart of tax season. 

Anxiety-inducing social media posts about coronavirus and 24/7 news coverage about COVID-19 aside, a stark fact remains: Everyday life and the way CPA firms work in the U.S. is going to change for the foreseeable future. 

If your business hasn’t been impacted yet, it most certainly will in the days ahead and you have to really ask yourself if you’re ready for your entire accounting staff to work remotely for weeks or months on end. 

Powerful, efficient, and user-friendly telecommuting infrastructures powered by cloud computing have never been more essential to businesses than right now.

As of this blog post, there are 121,061 confirmed global coronavirus cases and 4,368 confirmed global deaths, with 1,039 certified cases here in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering. 

Universities are closing, public schools are shuttering, sporting events are being canceled, and even entire countries have been quarantined. Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google — to name just a few of the companies whose offices are now empty — have told ALL of their employees to work remotely until the COVID-19 spread abates. Human resources and operations functions in the private sector are building contingency plans, the healthcare system is on high alert, government agencies are mobilized, and the National Guard has been deployed to New Rochelle, N.Y., to deal with the epicenter of the state’s coronavirus outbreak.

There is no need to panic, however. In the vast majority of cases, the coronavirus is much like influenza, which we deal with every year as a given part of life in winter. That said, the impact coronavirus will have on your CPA firm is new, profound, and an opportunity (though an unwanted one) to assess your company’s readiness for unexpected disasters, natural events, cyberattacks, and global public health threats.

Take Action Now Even If Your Business Isn’t Using the Cloud

Coronavirus and its impacts are here and if your business hasn’t felt its ripple effect yet it soon will. There isn’t time to migrate to the Cloud right now; your business needs tools immediately to help your team be safe at home while remaining engaged and productive.

At the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, businesses had to move quickly to total remote work, which saw an increase in the use of virtual meeting software and team collaboration tools like WebEx and others.  

If your business doesn’t have a remote work policy or its telecommuting ecosystem is still developing, don’t panic — stay calm and investigate the following quick fixes that you and your team can deploy to be a bridge to eventually transition to a more comprehensive cloud telecommuting environment:

• WebEx
• Hangouts Meet
• GoToMeeting
• Zoom
• Microsoft Teams
• Slack
• LogMeIn

A Strong Cloud Remote Work Environment is Critical to Mitigating Risk

Cloud computing and cloud services not only improve productivity and efficiency, but they also provide significant risk mitigation against the unexpected, like a pandemic. 

At Cetrom, we are experts at building cloud solutions that will enhance your CPA firm’s performance and elevate its ability to remain agile and pivot when confronted with unforeseeable events like natural disasters, cyberattacks, public health threats, and many other risks to business continuity.

When it's necessary to work from home or on the road, it’s imperative to have easy access to files and streamlined opportunities to collaborate from anywhere at any time. Cetrom’s Virtual Desktop, also known as VDI or Desktop as a Service (DaaS), provides CPA firms the capability to stay up and running in the midst of an unexpected crisis, delivering peace of mind to the business, security to its team and protection for the bottom line.

Cetrom’s VDI offers CPA firms:

• A cloud-based remote desktop solution provides access to the same icons, applications, folders, and files available on desktop computers in your office.
• Easy virtual desktop launch from a single icon, or through any web browser. 
• Complete secure because we store and execute virtual desktops directly from our servers, located in our U.S.-based data centers that meet top-tier security requirements.  

Cetrom is here to help during times like these where uncertainty leads to reassessment and then corrective action. Agile businesses will think differently about the way they operate after the coronavirus threat fades in the coming months.

Will your CPA firm think differently? For now, take the interim remote work steps listed earlier in this blog to navigate the next few months.

And when you’re prepared to take bolder action, the Cetrom team will be ready, as always, to help you reduce risks, improve productivity and elevate your ability to protect your team and data from the unexpected.

For more, accurate and trustworthy information on the coronavirus/COVID-19, please refrain from gathering information from social media. Instead, turn to these reputable sources about COVID-19:

• World Health Organization
• The Center for Disease Control and Prevention
  • Download guide to keeping workplaces safe 
• Johns Hopkins University