Pentagon shattered speed record to give 1 million people remote work tools – By Andrew Eversden (C4ISRNET.com) / January 11 2021
WASHINGTON — For a seven-member team inside the Pentagon, March 19 last year is known as the Thursday that never ended.
That day, COVID-19 cases in the U.S. had soared 40 percent in 24 hours, and the California governor issued the nation’s first stay-at-home order for residents. A few days earlier, the Department of Defense began sending employees home.
To prepare for the impending national emergency, the small IT staff sprinted to enable more than 1 million employees to work remotely at once, up from 95,000 on an average day before the pandemic.
The race to set up telework for the largest employer in the U.S. — and likely the world — included increasing circuits, upgrading infrastructure, expanding virtual private networks and drastically boosting bandwidth. But the department needed a collaboration platform so employees’ work could continue uninterrupted.
The scramble led to the Commercial Virtual Remote Environment, or CVR, a platform with Microsoft Teams collaboration tools and other Office 365 products that gave employees new telework tools such as chat, video conferencing and document sharing.
