In these times of unpredictability, businesses everywhere are striving to make the most out of this “new normal.” Here at Aligned Technology Solutions, we too are using this time to support our employees and local community. We’ve implemented new policies in response to COVID-19 and the recent market downturn.
Most of our policies and all of our systems were designed to allow for remote work from day one. We needed to do this for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity sake, and today we’re benefitting from that strategy. As an Information Technology (IT) services company, these are topics we spend a great deal of time advising our clients on.
We follow our own advice because it’s all rooted in good practical sense. Our team leverages cloud solutions heavily in our Managed Services (MSP) and Managed Security Services (MSSP) practices. Accordingly, we haven’t had to make many policy changes. The ones we have changed have to do with limitations on onsite client work and when it is absolutely required, the safety precautions to be taken by our team.
Our Aligned Technology Solutions team is maintaining face-to-face contact through video calls and conferencing. We leverage Microsoft’s Office 365, Sharepoint, and Teams platforms for collaboration, which makes it easy. Any individual can reach any other person on our team or groups of people with a quick click of the mouse.
What’s more, our team leaders schedule daily video “huddles” to quickly touch base with everyone on how they’re doing. We also hold a virtual happy hour on Fridays where everyone gets on their camera at the same time to discuss non-work-related and fun subjects.
For our client’s businesses, we’ve helped them transition from physical offices in Northern Virginia, Washington, DC, and Maryland, to complete virtual operations and teleworking. Fortunately, this was not a huge stretch as they’ve followed our advice over the years in preparing for this mode of operation.
We’ve leveraged technologies such as VPN, VoIP, Cloud Solutions, Endpoint Protection, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). In some cases, we’ve had to go well beyond the extra mile to solve supply chain issues that if left unresolved, would result in various adverse effects on our clients, including stalling their growth and ability to provide some desperately-needed jobs during this crisis.
Even more importantly, some of these situations involve healthcare providers who are directly supporting the pandemic response. All taking place within some tight security and compliance frameworks including HIPAA, DFARS, NIST 800.53 / 800.171, ISO 27001, and SOC2 Type II to name a few. For businesses in general, we’ve emphasized the need to support our local businesses through our continued patronage. Even if it takes a different form, like ordering goods for pickup or remote delivery instead of going into shops and restaurants. We want them to be there when the dust settles so we have to do what we can to support them during these times.
Another way we’ve been helping other businesses has been through leaving online reviews. Did you know that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations? It’s true. In efforts to collect client feedback ourselves, we’ve partnered with Clutch. Clutch is a ratings and reviews platform that features B2B service providers.
Our profile allows us to maintain an online presence, receive constructive feedback, and recognize our employee’s contributions. If you’d like to leave a review about your past or ongoing engagement with us, feel free to do so here! Our leadership team at Aligned Technology solutions is thrilled to support other businesses by reviewing our partners as well.
