On the 8th and 9th of May the great and the good of the financial world are set to down tools and desert their desks in the square mile of Canary Wharf, to work from home in an attempt to test the health of their corporate IT infrastructures.
“Canary Wharf's stations are expected to be among the busiest throughout the two weeks of the Games as ticketholders travel to the Olympic Park,” commented Marcus Jewell, UK country manager at Brocade, “and during the Olympics we expect more people than ever to work from home, in both Canary Wharf and Greater London as a whole.”
“With employees accessing email archives, VPNs, company files and potentially using unified communications to simulate the environment of the boardroom the corporate network will be stretched to breaking point. With less than 90 days until the start of the games, testing network resilience and capabilities, as well as areas of potential weaknesses, is a prudent and sensible move by the likes of KPMG, Barclays and Deloitte,” he added.
“Now is the time to really think about your organisation’s network and whether it is up to the job. Could your network let you down at the worst possible time, or is your business taking smart (and often simple) measures to mitigate disaster? By stress testing networks now, it will give CIOs and IT managers alike, the crucial time they need to respond to the findings.
“The concept of stress testing networks and the parallels between huge multinational financial institutions, and smaller individual companies is not at once an obvious one - however delve a little deeper and they are there to see. IT infrastructure is no less important to a company of 20, than it is to an organisation of 20,000; in fact, some would argue that the smaller company actually suffers more from downtime or inefficiency, as it is less easily able to assimilate the cost to its overall productivity.
“The proposed initiative on May the 8th and 9th in Canary Wharf will serve to test the networking readiness of the financial giants, but more importantly, it should represent a wake up call to companies of all shapes and sizes who have yet to realise the importance of IT and networks in maintaining productivity during the Olympic fortnight,” Jewell finished.