BCDR is its own discipline, so we should treat it that way. BCDR and preparedness have to reach down to the grassroots level, and be considered one of the mainstream processes in conjuction with continual improvement.

Yet, Zoho makes a sudden transistion to work-from-home in just 3 days!

How did we make this unimaginable switch?

A Covid -19 case study

COVID-19 outbreak in 2020: Message from CEO & early warning

In Feb 2020, we faced a global outbreak of COVID-19 that underlined the substantial risk of major global operational disruption.

25 Feb, 2020 3:28 PM (IST)

In the wake of the global pandemic, we received a message from our CEO's desk asking the 10000+ workforce to brace themselves for the worst and deliver their best. He also hinted on the expected economic downturn that would continue through most of the 2020 and the biggest challenge would be to sustain a meaningful level of operation through the next six to nine months. The message also listed the timely measures that need to be taken in light of the pandemic and as part of our written BCDR.

The big announcement, after a tough call

04 March, 11.26 AM (IST)

On March 04, word came from our CEO that it is time for us to embrace the remote-work culture.

8000+ workforce, spread across 12 offices globally, serving over 50 million users across the globe making the jump to remote work culture sounded impossible, but it was also a game-changing decision - One we don't regret!

Soon, Zoho became one of the first technology companies to switch to the work from home model in the face of COVID-19.

Kicking out COVID-19

Zoho is a people-centric company. The health and safety of our employees comes first. As stated earlier, we acted early. Over the last two years, our employees have been travelling a lot for meetings, workshops, seminars, and trade shows. We also have our support and pre-sales teams sitting at customer locations. Our first step was to call all our employees back home to our Estancia office, Chennai, India.

We also put in place several measures - including increased precautions at our facilities based on WHO and local government recommendations. We are also constantly monitoring the situation, following government directives, and our HR and admin teams are frequently communicating updates to our employees across the world.

The campus to be operational under the restricted access mode and only the critical resources such as system admins and other resources from the NOC will be allowed inside the campus. These resources can access the campus with written consent from the HR team.
Common areas such as conference rooms, gyms, and recreational areas are to remain closed.
All Zoho and ManageEngine events and business trips (both domestic and international) were canceled (until further notice) well before the government announced flight bans.
Employees returning from travel from high risk countries will be asked to quarantine for 14 calendar days (even when they didn't show any symptoms) and should not come into physical contact with other employees during this time. After the 14-day quarantine period, the employees were to be tested by the in-house doctor, and get a note saying the employee is at no risk.
Isolation rooms are set up for
The in-house doctor to monitor the health of the working employees. If the working employees have symptoms such as cough or fever, they are to work from home.
Sanitizers and N95 masks to be kept in prominent places inside the Zoho premises.
All employees to undergo temperature checks using thermal scanners, wear masks at all times, and use sanitizers liberally (follow the 20-sec hand washing rule).

When an employee is tested positive and shows symptoms of illness, we provide continued support and monitor the employee’s health condition. We also have contact tracing forms to trace all those who have come in contact with the affected employee. The employee, including the contacts, are required to self-quarantine for a mandatory 14-day period they are to return to Zoho only after a full recovery and with a doctor’s note confirming their recovery. We immediately shut the workplace to sanitize and decontaminate all areas including the common areas (washrooms, lunch hall, pantry) that the employee may have accessed.

Following this, an external communication is sent out to the local government, health care authorities, stakeholders, partners, and media.

Zoho runs on Zoho

Over the last few months, we have been supporting customers, developing new product capabilities, undertaking product fixes, planning future releases, delivering service packs, and more from our work from home model. We have been doing all this in the way our organization works every day.

For a company our size, we surprisingly don’t use third party business software. We've always run all our operations on cloud—sales, marketing, customer support, finance, legal, IT etc. — using our very own suite of 45+ applications. Here’s a roundup of some of the most important tools that let us lead the charge on remote culture.

Communication and collaboration

We come together online to collaborate in real-time using Connect, Cliq, and Mail and work as if we were still in the same building. Nearly all of our conversations happen on Connect, so anyone can chime in and catch up on what’s happening across other teams and departments. The teams from different time zones can easily gain context and pick up where others left off. The HR and admin team, use these applications to relay work from home and COVID 19 announcements and to keep everyone in the loop.

When communication starts to get a tad confusing, we can quickly hop into video conferencing the same way that we'd walk to a team member's cubicle in our office setting. While nothing comes close to in-person meetings, Meeting and Showtime help mimic this interaction and let us have meaningful conversations and clear any setbacks.

Whether it’s outlining the COVID-19 policies or crafting this eBook, Workdrive lets us get our work done. It is a fantastic content collaboration platform that lets us simultaneously write, edit, comment, and share from one open and shared workspace, regardless of the time zones.

Managing projects

Many of our product teams use Zoho Projects to assign, track progress, and stay on top of our projects especially our product releases. Without Projects, our teams will be running in circles and missing important deadlines. It's also a blessing for our managers as it helps them know people aren't slacking off.

There is more. Our sales and marketing teams use Zoho Campaigns, CRM, and Zoho Social. Our support teams serve customers using Zoho Desk. We hire people with Zoho Recruit, manage them with Zoho People, and balance our books using Zoho Books.

Zorro saves the day (yet again!)

Our IT infrastructure is the backbone of our business operations. Zorro, our network administration team, constantly works behind the scenes long after we leave. When they are not fixing our laptops, or recovering lost files, they are firefighting a major incident. The things they do to keep our business running is nearly superhuman. Zorro often handles a small number of remote workers on ad-hoc basis. This time around, 8000+ workforce (including the CEO) went remote overnight. Zorro is hustling every day to:

Secure our data

We use multiple devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets, and desktops) and multiple operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows, and Chrome). Going remote means our devices are outside the wall. As long as our devices are outside and online, our data is at risk.

Today, remote endpoint management and security is Zorro's top priority. They support our employees taking full remote control over the BYOD and company-owned devices to provide secure updates, manage patches, deploy software, and manage licenses - all the while keeping track of malicious activities across these endpoints.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) are installed to establish a secure connection between our employees network and Zoho's internal network. Once connected, our employees can access the resources on our network just like their devices were physically plugged in at the office using their own unique and confidential username and password.

All of Zoho's cloud applications use a highly reliable single sign on (SSO) mechanism. While we enjoy the SSO experience, Zorro manage all user accounts, monitor our activities in real-time, and enhance security multi fold within the organization.

Further, multi factor authentication enables a two-step verification process across all Zoho applications. One extra step while logging in to our accounts saves us all from security nightmares forever.

Monitor and respond to incidents

As stated earlier, cyber attackers are not taking time off during the pandemic, and while we are distracted trying to contain the virus, Zorro and our NOC teams are more cautious than ever. NOC is monitoring our network, websites, servers, and applications at all times to take necessary action when a critical event such as network outage happens.

Troubleshoot issues

The cubicle to couch shift gave us all time to cook lunch, do laundry between tasks, or walk our pets. Until, reality set in. On a regular day - account locked, unable to take a campaign live, Abobe license expired, browser issues, unable to set up VPN are regular IT requests, with one exception. Everyone's remote. So, our IT pitstop technicians now ask for our permission to take remote access control of our devices to troubleshoot issues and fix all our tech problems.

Manage the influx of IT tickets

We still need equipment from our quarantined work sites (laptops, chargers, mobile phones, mouse, or sometimes even personal items forgotten at our workstations). Our IT pitstop technicians collect the data they need: laptop model, charger type, workstations IDs et cetera using our ITSM tool. With more context, they can respond to tickets easily. They also pass on information such as gate pass number and the point of contact to collect our equipment and belongings using this tool.

Zorro has also made several ITSM-based workflow improvements to business teams - HR, Finance, Legal and so on to collaborate and work better.

Enable password resets

Let's be honest. Two weeks is all it takes for us to forget our passwords. We still get locked out of our accounts, but our pitstop technicians help us securely self reset our passwords and unlock our accounts from the comfort of our homes.

Identify and manage vulnerabilities

As cyberattacks spiked after COVID-19, Zorro is constantly looking for new threats. When a vulnerability is identified, Zorro quickly patches the flaws before they lead to a breach, in the process protecting Zoho from falling a victim to cyberattacks.

Manage privileged access

Some of our user accounts have more significance than the others and have super privileges. Their elevated capabilities and access puts these accounts at a higher risk of being compromised. Zorro monitors all privileged accounts alerting senior management if any suspicious activity is performed from those accounts.

Some of the activities or tasks such as major changes to a server or network configurations also need privileged access.

Manage assets

Since most of our employees moved to their hometowns during the lockdown, they have taken the company owned assets (smartphones, laptops, et cetera) allocated to them. Zorro has to maintain a sound asset inventory and manage licenses, so post COVID-19, when our employees are back at office, we can ensure the assets are accounted for.

Share knowledge

With wfh becoming the new normal, some of our distributed employees have become more self-reliant. They are accessing Zorro's internal resources to catch up on articles related to VPNs or firewall issues before reaching out to IT pitstop technicians.

In it together

Our workforce

The switch to work from home has changed our lives. We continue to miss the casual swing bys to the pantry, chats next to the coffee machine, and access to plenty of good food. But it’s also given us plenty of positives: cutting down on the long hours of commute, judgment-free outfit choices, quality time with family, and — of course — more productivity.

Yes, that's right. We have seen an uptick in productivity after our work from home and we are thankful to all our business teams and employees. Here's what some of our ManageEngine colleagues have to say:

Give back to our customers

To facilitate a smooth work from home transition, IT needs access to critical systems in the infrastructure like servers, applications, databases, and network devices. However, some of our SMB customers have security concerns and are not open for remote access. We feel them.

ManageEngine has made available fully functional versions of our secure remote access toolkit, comprising Access Manager Plus and Remote Access Plus, to IT teams (typically SMBs) free of cost till July 1, 2020. All our ManageEngine tools help customers build multiple layers of security to enable remote access to critical systems.