The past few months have been filled with a great deal of uncertainty and hardship. We know coronavirus news tends to be far more depressing than it is hopeful, and we at SMR certainly have no intention of adding to the ever-growing sum of stressful news. However, we do want to provide an update on how we have been able to help our clients navigate through these difficult and unusual times, as well as some general reflections.  

Just like our clients and most of the world, we had to transition quickly to remote work, in doing our part to flatten the curve. We know how our clients feel because we’ve been going through these changes right beside them. We at SMR are proud to say that the work we’ve been doing for our clients has eased many of the challenges that come with the shift to working from home.  

Here at SMR Consulting, we’re big advocates of cloud technologies. Since the beginning of lockdown, enabling our clients to work from home has obviously been our top priority and most common issue.  Traditionally there are a lot of tasks that people do for work that can only be done from their physical office. However, as recent events have forced the world to realize, this does not always have to be the case. Many companies have traditionally kept stuff in their office, since having it there physically brought a sense of comfort and a feeling that it was safer from hackers that way. But with the functionality that’s available today, you can make using OneDrive and SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies just as secure. As such, we have been working over the last few years towards setting up our clients to be able to work from home, or anywhere, in a secure manner. The whole Covid-19 situation accelerated that process. It suddenly became very important to the last few clients that had been more dependent on environments that could only be accessed when they were physically in the office. As such, we have either moved or begun planning to make the necessary changes to make it so they can work remotely. But because cloud technologies were already part of our standard practices and technology upgrades, most of our clients already had the means to make that switch. Out of over one hundred current clients, we only needed to begin the process of transitioning to remote work from scratch for about ten of them.  

We’ve been encouraging and helping clients switch to cloud based systems for years, so we know what we’re doing when it comes to making these transitions. While no positive outcomes can take away from the great losses brought on by this pandemic, we are thankful that the existing protocols and past work SMR has done made our clients lives just a little easier during this hectic time.