COVID-19 vs. our Networks

Thu Mar 12 19:37:51 UTC 2020

> On Mar 12, 2020, at 3:00 PM, Troy Martin <tmartin at charter.ca> wrote:
> 
> On March 12, 2020 10:22 AM, g at 1337.io wrote: 
>> With talk of there being an involuntary statewide (WA) and then national
>> quarantines (house arrest) for multiple weeks, has anyone put thought
>> into the impacts of this on your networks if/when this comes to
>> fruition?
> 
> No WFH policy here yet, but I've unpacked a couple of our ASAs from before our
> most recent edge refresh to run AnyConnect for some of our remote sites. I'm
> not expecting too much load being that we're not a particularly large company,
> but it's better to have an extra couple RU filled up and happily whirring away
> than to get a phone call at 5am when everyone in Eastern Time logs in and the
> throughput drops like the Dow Jones.
> 
> I'm more worried about the lead times on new hardware skyrocketing than the
> impact of having 8-10x the teleworkers. At least we can still fulfill orders
> for software licenses…

We are all on a split VPN here and slowly moving to a no-VPN solution with some users already on that.  They are finding things that aren’t quite covered right or properly, but that list is slowly shrinking.

I’m expecting that many places will be moving from a full VPN to a split solution.  At my prior employer we did split VPN as well for v4 and full for V6 as not everyone had native v6, so split didn’t make sense there.  (Those with native v6 did gripe, but it was better to have a consistent solution).

I’m expecting that despite the usual game and download/streaming events, the baseline usage during the daytime is going to tick up significantly eating into network margin.  Hopefully everyone has your upgrades on order due to the aforementioned lead-time issues.  Hopefully everything is back to normal in 4-6 weeks.

I’m looking forward to a few people learning how to WFH and expecting many people to realize how much they don’t get along as well when they’re in the house all day with the kids.  

We have an internal thread going on the WFH tips:

#1 Take a break.  That walk you would take to Starbucks or whatever, build something comparable into it at home.

There’s a few other pro-tips, but the take a break one is one I feel is important.  

- Jared