The scale of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted everyday life across the globe. The long-term implications will affect not only how we view, react and manage future contagions, but also how we function in our familial, social and work environments. Faced with remote-work mandates, enterprises must make prompt decisions to safeguard critical business functions and operations while meeting business continuity requirements. For many organizations, enabling workers to be productive from remote locations hasn’t been a priority, especially if a physical presence has been considered a prerequisite.

Effective remote working with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft’s flagship product, “Teams,” part of the Office 365 family, empowers a workforce to be effective anywhere. It offers the following benefits-

• Real-time collaboration hub: Teams assembles multiple communication tools and methods to provide a real time collaboration hub for various business units and geographies.
• Enriched in-person meeting experience: Teams enables robust staff meetings with simultaneous content sharing and review in real time.
• Integration capabilities: MS Teams integrates with the full Office suite, SharePoint, Planner task management app, Stream video portal, and even Power BI. This ensures employees immediate access to the information and tools to stay productive remotely. Further, MS Teams can complement usage across different collaboration channels such as Slack, Zoom, WebEx or Skype, thereby reducing the risk of relying on a single channel for day-to-day and critical communications.
• Enterprise grade security: Enterprises consistently demand security, particularly when deploying or engaging remote workers. Teams benefits from the enterprise-grade security integrated with the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center and Azure Active Directory. Along with Microsoft 365, this allows employees to connect securely to an environment they trust for efficient collaboration regardless of location or device.

In March 2020, Microsoft highlighted that MS Teams has hit 44 Million daily active users, spiking 37% in one week amid remote work surge.

Meeting the needs of the insurance sector

MS Teams is a useful tool for insurance companies as it can effectively support prompt decision-making to safeguard critical business functions / operations and also meet the immediate business continuity requirements in the post COVID-19 environment.

Insurance companies have unique operating structures with multiple internal and external users who need different level of access to critical business applications. Figure 1 maps remote working and collaboration needs of these user groups, which point to the relevant features of MS Teams to create a secured and efficient remote working environment.

MS Teams enables your employees across the organization to efficiently communicate and collaborate with colleagues, partners, suppliers and/or external parties.

Accelerating deployment of MS Teams

Our MS Teams solution framework can help insurers as they transform and/or empower remote workforce to connect, communicate and collaborate within the ecosystem from home. Deploying Teams begins with a quick assessment of the current landscape, planning the migration, piloting deployments to identify challenges or risks, and applying quick mitigations to ensure a smooth rollout. This rapid deployment model takes two to six weeks from beginning to end, after which employees can leverage a secure, highly reliable platform to collaborate and do their best work.

Rapid Deployment / Rollout

• Rapid current landscape assessment and migration planning and pilot deployments
• Rapid deployment and rollout to entire workforce
• 2-6 week rapid deployment covering end-to-end lifecycle
• Secure and highly reliable platforms for exchanging ideas, having conversations, collaborating, and doing their best work

Adoption & Change Management

• Easy to follow adoption framework
• Guides through the change management with readily available toolkit
• Readily available multilingual training materials, user guides and videos, leveraged from Microsoft standard material tailored to suit customer needs

Governance & Security

• Employee safety by enabling remote workplace during current crisis and ever evolving global situation
• Setup of well governed and secured environment - controlled creation & retention, data loss prevention, e-discovery automation, conditional access (MFA), device management using Microsoft Intune etc.
• Additional solution features with light agent requires some degree of integration with the organization’s internal communication channel. These can be made available as required for further protection.

Sustain - L1 & L2 Support

• Hyper care support during rapid rollout
• Shared services model with optimal pricing 

Application Integration

• Microsoft, third party and other in-house application integrations and selective deployments

Business Apps Development & Rollout

• Extensive experience in designing, building and deploying in-house custom MS Teams apps
• Partnered with Microsoft MS Teams growth team as part of slate program, providing developer support across globe for all Microsoft customers
• Migrate Skype / Slack customizations to MS teams