First week under COVID-19 lock-down in Austria (March 22nd)

23. March 2020 Leave a comment

General Situation

One week has passed since Austria was set under lock-down. When being outside (Work, Shopping Food, Taking a walk) at least 1m distance has to be kept between people, gathering in groups is not allowed. The Police is enforcing the rules with fines up to 3600€. Students, who party and potentially spread the virus can be expelled from university.

Home Office

Our company is now running 100% from home office. It turned out that Teams is now the backbone for us. On monday some of us experienced problems in Teams. However, this is more than understandable when so many companies had to switch to home office and schools are also using Teams for distance learning. Microsoft reported they have now 44 million users on Teams. The usage of Teams also increased significantly in our company.

Teams usage increased during home office

While the cloud scales pretty good, the local internet connection at our office is relativly fixed. There are peeks during working hours because we still have some workloads on-prem but monitoring the traffic it seams we are pretty fine with the current bandwidth. Same goes for the sizing of our RDS host which can handle the remaining on-prem workload as well. The more you are cloud-based, the less you have to worry about on-prem bottlenecks.

During the Corona crisis Microsoft, Google, Teamviewer and others offer their collaboration tools for free. To ensure there is enough bandwidth for home office (e.g. while the kids are streaming videos), Netflix announced (was asked) to reduced the quality of video streaming. The RTR announced that providers may omit net neutrality and reduced the bandwith for video streaming. Even more concerning is that A1 Telekom now gives anonymous(?) movement profiles of cell phones to the government and red cross.

There is also something good to take away from this crisis. It is a massive push for digital transformation because now companies are forced to embrace cloud services like Teams to stay operable. We already heard from cloud-sceptical customers that especially Teams is very welcome. Teams & Co is not only used to enable home office, but also to switch former face-to-face contacts with customers and suppliers to remote contact.

Now, that we the number of appointments and customer vistis have been significantly reduced we use some time for house keeping like patching servers, upgrading operating systems, etc. We were planning to take some exams to meet the Microsoft Competency requirements. Thomas Maurer published a good article about how to take an certification exam online. This is also a breathing time to work on our Blockchain research project and migrate applications from the Blockchain Workbench to the Blockchain Service in Azure.