Office Space News
Officescape Touts Emergency Offices in Swine Flu Pandemic
Published May 7th, 2009 by Jennifer LeClaire
The World Health Organization (WHO) is stirring fears over the swine flu pandemic on Thursday. The WHO has suggested up to 2 billion people could be infected with the virus if the current outbreak isn’t contained.
“If the situation continues to evolve and the virus does become established in other countries, and we do move into a pandemic, we would expect the virus to infect many people,” said WHO Chief Keiji Fukuda at a press conference on Thursday. “Perhaps a third of the world’s population could be infected with this virus, based on previous pandemic.”
Although the company is hoping for the best, Officescape is prepared to help companies keep business operations moving with emergency offices that allow employees to work from home, a remote office or from anywhere, anytime, whether during quarantine or outside of the flu-affected area.
Reconsidering Business Continuity
The swine flu pandemic has caused many businesses to reevaluate their emergency-preparedness and continuity of operations plans. Guess what industry is one of the beneficiaries of this frightening H1N1 outbreak? Virtual offices, telework and emergency offices.
Indeed, the U.S. federal government’s National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Implementation Plan cites the benefits of using telework and emergency office solutions to slow the spread of the flu by keeping face-to-face contact to a minimum and reducing required travel, while continuing operations as close to normal as possible.
Officescape is filling the bill with emergency office services for both public and private-sector companies, even if no plans were in place prior to an emergency. In fact, Officescape has been offering these types of services for many years and has a track record for helping businesses keep operations rolling through various types of emergencies.
Case in point: Officescape provided emergency office solutions to Authentium, a Palm Beach, Gardens, Florida-based security software company, to ensure continuity of operations when Hurricane Ivan threatened Florida’s coastlines.
What is an Emergency Office?
Emergency office services focus on ensuring readiness of physical office and conference space, communications, data and computing. If it becomes necessary, for example, Officescape can provide services to support and manage remotely an entire telework force. Officescape can even serve up all the applications on a corporate server for employees using its TelOffice Box thin client computing device.
Officescape promises it can set up emergency offices in as little as 24 hours. Nonetheless, Officescape is urging companies that don’t have business continuity plans in place not to wait for a pandemic crisis of any kind before arranging for emergency office or telework services. These services reduce the risk of continued infection and also provide the essential tools to allow companies to maintain continuity of operations and productivity.
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Rob Zeus May 8th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Everybody is getting in on the swine flu frenzy, aren’t they? In this case looking at telework and emergency offices seems like smart business. There wasn’t much said about virtual offices in the story, but the same holds true. What Officescape does is provide a very robust infrastructure for telework. Worth looking into.
Elizabeth Sanchez May 8th, 2009 at 3:33 am
I think it’s smart for companies to look into workplace contingency plans for swine flu, hurricanes, and other disasters. The bottom line is telework can keep an organization up and running so it sustains less damage than its competitors. Of course, we don’t want any company to suffer. But the bottom line is the companies that have business continuity plans in place with virtual office technologies are the ones that will fare better in crisis.
Melanie Jones May 8th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
I hadn’t heard of the concept of emergency offices too much before now. I’ve heard of telework, of course, and of virtual offices. I’ve heard of disaster planning and business continuity. But the concept of emergency offices is new to me. Is this something Officescape made up or is this a standard thing I’ve just missed?
Marcus Hester May 8th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Hmm. I hadn’t heard of the term emergency offices either. So Melanie is not the only one. I can’t say Officescape made it up. But it does look like they are trying to leverage the swine flu to give companies an urgency about signing up for its services. That’s a fear play, and one of the four main motivators in advertising. Not surprising. Lots of companies are doing this. But this is the first office space play I’ve seen.
Can Virtual Offices Offer Swine Flu Immunity? September 4th, 2009 at 11:00 am
[...] May, abetteroffice reported on Officescape’s solutions to the swine flu pandemic from a workplace perspective. We’ve also reported on Cisco’s positive [...]