COVID-19: NITRA Charges Firms To Implement Robust ICT Platforms

By Cyber Era Reporter

Driven by the desire to keep incidences of coronavirus(COVID-19) southwards,  and maximise workers’ safety and security, companies and establishments, both in the private and public sectors of the economy, have been urged to improve on their ICT architecture to enable their workers  work from home, or what is within employment circles called telecommuting.

Telecommuting, also known as working from home (WFH), working remotely, or e-commuting, is a work arrangement in which the employee works outside the office. Often this means working from home or at a location close to home, such as coffee shops, libraries, or co-working spaces.

Speaking in the light of increasing cases of the COVID-19 infections, the Chairman of the Nigeria Information Technology Reporters Association (NITRA), Chike Onwuegbuchi noted that this was the time when most company’s technology platforms would be tested, following the directive for people to maintain a relatively good social distance as a measure of curbing the rate of infections from the virus.

Onwuegbuchi called on companies to ensure they put in place secure messaging platforms for company staff to interact while at home, and also maintain a strong and secure server that would handle the increased traffic on their company networks.

The NITRA chairman urged management of companies to empower their staff so that they could be productive from home saying this was to ensure that productivity was not reduced to zero due to the scourge of COVID-19.

Speaking on the need for a robust technology to help companies operate with remote staff input, Onwuegbuchi noted that service providers could contribute their quota to alleviating the difficulties people were facing in this trying period by offering low cost technological services.

He called on telecom service providers, including mobile network operators (MNOs), to reduce their charges for voice and data services in a bid to make communication cheaper and easier for their consumers. This, he noted would make consumers rely more on telecommunications and live streaming of messages/communications rather than physical meetings.

It would be recalled that the Lagos state government has put measures in place to ensure that the spread of the virus is greatly minimized.

Some of the measures put in place include  but are not limited to a directive that gathering of people in a particular space be reduced to 50. These include places of religious gathering, social gatherings and political gathering.

Also the state government has directed civil servants of Grade Level 12 and below in the state to work from home as from Monday March 23.