Posted by: Eric Siegel
(Edited Oct 18, 2009, with probably more edits in the future!)
It's late at night; it's a good time for worrying.
Current worry: pandemics. Swine (H1N1) Flu.
What happens if there's a pandemic, and your staff has to work from home?
First, see the U.S. Government website: http://www.pandemicflu.gov
But second, how are we going to handle the communications problem? If your staff is going to work from home, using their consumer-grade Internet connections (DSL, cable), they may be in for a bad surprise. I worry that everybody is going to have that same idea, and your staff will have to compete for the access paths with millions of people downloading movies and music and YouTube and Facebook. Remember, the first groups of people who will be sent home will almost certainly be schoolchildren, and I'd guess that they'll be heavy users of high-bandwidth applications.
Unless the government or the service providers insist on traffic restrictions; for example, bandwidth-limiting YouTube at the YouTube servers (which might interfere with videos that are important for flu sufferers) or bandwidth-limiting peer-to-peer file sharing, I'm guessing that a lot of oversubscribed consumer-grade Internet access will be a congested mess. A lot of kids (and adults) doing a lot of video-watching and file sharing during the day, combined with a lot of working-from-home parents, may overload the access networks. And it will be a really tempting time for criminals to launch DDoS attacks; service provider staffs will be thin and will be overstretched.
Indeed, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security study published in December 2007 ("Pandemic Influenza Impact on Communications Networks Study") using a pandemic model based on Chicago and a telecommuting exercise by the Federal Reserve Board showed that "In the 40 percent absenteeism pandemic scenario, the telecommuting strategy is expected to be significantly impacted for most telecommuters during the peak of the pandemic," and "In the high absenteeism [90 percent; e.g., local quarantine] scenario, the telecommuting strategy is expected to be unusable for the majority of telecommuters during the peak of the pandemic."
So what should we do?
One option is clearly to have business-class dedicated lines or business-class VSAT to some selected members of the staff.
Another option would be plain old dial-up modem service. It won't work for the beginning of a crisis; there will be too much use of cellular and land telephone lines. But after that, I'd guess that the public switched telephone network will be more stable and less congested and more available than any consumer-grade Internet access. Just dust off those old modem racks in your basement, and be sure you have connectivity. And be sure your users have a modem at home or built in to their laptops. "Application remoting" (e.g., Citrix XenApp or Microsoft Terminal Services) can help provide good performance over dial-up modem links; the new software WAN optimization products (e.g., from Blue Coat, Cisco, Citrix, Expand, Riverbed, Stampede) can also help.
And I have more worries: will your server room's Internet access, firewalls, and VPN equipment have enough capacity to handle all of those incoming Internet and POTS remote users?
That's assuming that you have your server rooms functioning, with some staff available to handle all of the dial-in users and their service desk problems! But that's a different question, for another night's worry. I'll do some more digging on this topic and post more blog entries. And, of course, I'd love your comments!
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