Photo: Shutterstock The network use peaked on Monday morning at 11.30 am, just before lunch. ‘This is surprising,’ says Zwaan. ‘On an ordinary working day, this peak occurs around 2 pm.’ But this was no ordinary working day. MyWorkspace and VPN were used five times more than on a normal day, equally divided over both systems. A little over half of WUR’s 6000 employees were using the network from an external location during the peak.
Disconnected
Does this mean the other half was working on campus? No, according to Zwaan. ‘Many activities can be carried out without using our facilities. If you are working in Office, you don’t need a link to the WUR system.’ Nevertheless, Monday 16 March will go on record as the most intensive home office day so far. Zwaan expects this record to be broken soon, Tuesdays and Thursdays are generally the busiest days of the week. The expected activity is unlikely to cause issues.
“The percentage of errors was less than 0.1 per cent. We are rather happy with that”
Floris Jan Zwaan
‘MyWorkspace was operating at 8o per cent of its capacity today,’ states Zwaan. ‘Behind the scenes, we are doing what we can to add more servers. VPN is no problem; it could easily handle thousands more.’ Working from home also caused extensive use of Skype calls. On Monday, 11,641 conference calls were made. Zwaan: ‘The percentage of errors was less than 0.1 per cent. We are rather happy with that.’
Queue
The Servicedesk-IT also had a top-day, as expected. A team of 15 people, many more than usual, handled over 500 calls – two and a half times the average number. A total of 100 calls were missed, probably due to the queue time. Zwaan expects the number of questions will decrease over the next few days. ‘Many people are working from home for the first time, and have obvious questions such as how to access their local drive (C:- or D:- drive) on MyWorkspace.’