Worried about swine flu at work? Work from home!

These are scary times indeed.  The latest tally is 109 swine flu cases in the US and things are likely to get worst before they get better.  Fears of a potential pandemic are beginning to hit business environments where companies are worried not only for the safety of their employees, but also the health of their business. Companies are already feeling the financial strain of the current economy and adding the potential for a wide spread pandemic presents some monumental challenges where companies need healthy employees to continue the march towards a healthy business.

According to a recent arcticle in theworkbuzz.com, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that you should stay home if you experience flu-like symptoms.  While this sounds like common sense advice, it is amazing how many people come to work sick.  Vice President Joe Biden takes things a step further and recommends that people stay away from confined areas such as airplanes whether they are sick or not.

If you can't go into the office or travel on business what do you do?  You can work from home!  Even if you do not experience flu like symptoms, working at home is going to obviously limit your exposure to contagious ailments like swine flu.  Not to mention the other benefits like more time devoted to work and less time wasted commuting. 

While working at home obviously makes sense during disastrous situations and arguably makes sense in normal conditions, there are some technical issues to consider.  The further away you are from your applications and data, the poorer the performance you will experience.  If you are used to the performance when working in your office, you may be shocked to know that performance for remote connections can be 10 times, 20 times, and in some cases even 100 times slower!  Email slows to a crawl, opening up documents from the corporate file server takes 20 minutes instead of 20 seconds.   While working from home can make sense, lost productivity resulting from poor performance could offset the value you get from working from home.

This is where WAN optimization is critical.  Riverbed's Steelhead Mobile product was designed for this purpose in mind.  Simply install the software on your laptop or home office PC and applications perform like they did when you were in the office.  Steelhead Mobile enables a notion of location independence where you get the same level of performance whether you are in the office, traveling, or working from home. It's like being in the office virtually and in times like this, virtually is much more healthy than physically.  Ware Malcomb is a great example of a company that relies on Steelhead Mobile to accelerate their employees access to corporate applications while they are outside of the office.  According to Moses Gonzales, Director of IT at Ware Malcomb, documents that once took employees over 5 minutes to open, now take a matter of seconds with Steelhead Mobile installed on their laptop.

Well, that's it from me.  Back to work and yes, I am working from home today.  If you are interested to see what Steelhead Mobile is doing for me at home, here is a demo I recently recorded: