Even big banks face challenges in remote-work capabilities
Staggered hours, dropped connections are the reality in extraordinary times
TORONTO Companies across Canada are racing to implement workfrom-home protocols as a result of COVID-19, but even some of the biggest are running into difficulties getting all of their employees set up to work remotely.
Among them are at least two of the country’s big banks, which despite their significant resources have been forced to adopt workarounds — including limiting the amount of time staff spend online or forcing them to work outside their normal shifts — in order to facilitate off-site work at scale.
At CIBC, an internal email sent by management to some employees on Thursday morning, stated that employees not in a “critical or vital” role would have to ensure that they are logged off CIBC systems by 9:30 a.m. ET and take a “flexible approach” to work that involves using “remote access only prior to 9:30 a.m. ET and after 5 p.m. ET to access documents, then work offline during the day.”
“If a Vital user begins to experience a system slowdown or other issues during off-peak hours, we ask you to log off,” the email, obtained by Postmedia, read.
At BMO, a similar situation is playing out. An internal email sent on Wednesday to one department within the bank stated that only teams supporting “production operation activities” could log on at any time, while remaining teams would have remote access between the hours of 6 p.m. and 7 a.m.
“We need your help to ensure that we prioritize customer-facing and critical operation teams,” the email read. “I recognize that this will further restrict the way you are working, and I thank you for trying to be as productive as you can with these adjustments.”
A BMO employee who is now compelled to work overnight due to the server issues said there were issues logging on early this week and that their connection “dropped regularly.”
In an emailed statement, Sandy Sharman, CIBC’S group head of People, Culture and Brands, said that the bank’s work from home approach is so far “working very well,” adding that she was proud of how teams are “stepping up and working collaboratively through extraordinary times.”
A BMO spokesperson told Postmedia via email that many employees who can work from home are already doing so, and others are in the process of doing so.
“Our priorities are protecting the health of our employees and our customers,” the email read.
The problem, according to experts, is that the number of people working from home over the last week due to public health guidelines is unprecedented in modern history, placing undue pressure on networks and secure servers that do not have the bandwidth to handle the number of employees logging on at the same time.
Robert Herjavec, the founder of global cybersecurity firm Herjavec Group and a star of the TV shows Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank, said that he was “not surprised” some organizations were having technological challenges given the sudden number of employees working remotely.
“In the last three days, the amount of internet traffic has increased by 28 per cent. Look, this is the greatest migration of people by remote work in human history. No one could have predicted it, even though most organizations are very good about remote access,” Herjavec told Postmedia.
According to Megha Kumar, the head of software and cloud services research at IDC Canada, the challenge with having so many individuals logging on at once is that most organizations do not have their servers scaled up to manage the number of gateway licenses needed to have hundreds or thousands of different virtual private networks (VPNS) connect at once.
“If you overclog a network, servers might go down. You don’t want that. So it becomes a situation where businesses are now managing server capacity,” she said.
Herjavec used the analogy of people entering a closed gate.
“If you have one person entering a closed gate, that’s fine, it takes a few seconds. Imagine if you have 1,000 people. That last person is going to have to wait quite a while,” he explained.
“So now you need to build a new gate and I can tell you that many businesses are in that situation so it is going to take longer to get all those gates made,” he added.
Rick Bloom, CEO of Support. com, a website that provides software optimization tools to help businesses and individual users
If you have one person entering a closed gate, that’s fine, it takes a few seconds. Imagine if you have 1,000 people. That last person is going to have to wait quite a while.
struggling with tech issues says he believes this pandemic will simply have the effect of encouraging businesses to equip themselves with the right tools in the event that a crisis of this scale occurs again.
“I do believe more people will work from home going forward and businesses will have the capacity to allow that, if this lasts,” he said.
“Cultures and behaviours will adapt, even though for many companies it really is a steep learning curve right now.”