It’s almost December and the signs are pointing to a continuation of the current state of working from home for a lot of people out there. Whether it’s a surge in cases that is causing businesses to close again or a change in the way your company looks at offices and remote work, you’re likely going to ring in the new year at your home keyboard in your pajamas with a cup of something steaming next to your desk.

We have all spent a lot of time and money investing in better conditions for ourselves at home. Perhaps it was a fancy new mesh chair or a more ergonomic keyboard. It could have been a bigger monitor with a resolution increase or a better webcam for the dozen or so Zoom meetings that have replaced the water cooler. There may even be more equipment in store, such as a better home wireless setup or even a corporate SD-WAN solution to help with network latency. However, have you considered what might happen if it all goes wrong and you need to be online?

In and Outage

Outages happen more often than we realize. That’s never been more evident than the situation we find ourselves in now. There are providers that do maintenance during the day because most of their customers are at work. When that work happened in a building covered on a different grid or service line it was fine to reboot things in the afternoon. When everyone is at home working on video calls or remote classrooms it’s no longer ideal. And those are just the planned outages. What about the ones that happen without warning?

Between the extra usage at home and the increased stress on the system, I’m finding that my Internet connection is becoming much less stable than it has been in the past. When you’re on a consumer-grade line, you pay for the privilege of getting online when it works. When it doesn’t you get lumped in with the same group of people in your neighborhood or on your local loop. The provider response is usually a shrug and a “we’re working on it” response. Business lines cost twice as much for less speed but gain the ability to call and at least file a complaint or a ticket. If you’re lucky enough to have one with a good SLA you might even get a truck roll to your location within a few hours. Otherwise, you need to plan for the worst.

This is nothing new to the enterprise. The best SLA in the world is only a piece of paper with a specific promise. It doesn’t protected from the North American Fiber Seeking Backhoe or an ice storm that knocks out power to a few square miles of your town. We need to have plans in place to deal with the potential for not having what we need when we need it. In the enterprise that was part of the job. We bought firewalls in pairs and had expensive power equipment run into the data center to protect our services. The cloud is armored against outages, so long as the engineers keep their fingers off of things. But our house is neither the enterprise or the cloud. How can we ensure we’re able to work when nothing else looks like it’s going to get the job done?

Planning To Recover

In order to keep working from home in the event of an outage, you need to consider three important situations: Connectivity Outage, Power Outage, and a Location Outage.

Connectivity outages are the most basic situation we’re going to find ourselves in. The Internet is down or severely degraded. We need to get online and figure out how to keep working. That means we need a traffic plan. And we need to figure out how to get it working. The first step is going to require you to figure out how you’re going to get back online. Do you want to use your cell phone as a tethering device? Do you want to “borrow” the neighbor’s wireless (with permission, of course). Do you want to try and work completely from your mobile device. You need to figure this out ahead of time. You also need to test it.

If you’re going to rely on your phone for tethering, make sure you have that option enabled ahead of time. Find out how much data you have available and what happens if you go over. Do you get throttled to a slower speed? Do you need to pay more? You don’t want to find out what happens in the middle of a critical call. You also need to test the speed of the tethering at your house. For example, my LTE coverage at home is pretty terrible, so I need to fail back to 3G in order to have a stable signal. That means no video calls for me until my broadband connection comes back online.

If you plan is use your neighboring connection for a backup, please get permission first. You never want to find out someone is borrowing your network and you don’t want to do that to someone else. You also should verify that the neighboring connection is a diverse circuit. It won’t do you much good to hop on their connection only to find out they’re on the same provider and everything is offline for the entire block. Test it ahead of time and make sure their data plan works for you. And remember that you’re doubling the amount of traffic pouring through their circuit. You’re going to have to decide, as above, what traffic is critical to fail over. And give your neighbor a heads up so they don’t panic when everything gets slower.

Limited Power

Electricity is a bigger issue because it affects everything at a lower level of the stack. You can have bad connectivity and just work offline with your devices. But a power outage changes the game because half your devices may be out of commission. If my power goes out, my 4K monitor goes with it. That means I need to work from my laptop until I can get everything under control again. My time is limited to how long my laptop battery can hold out.

If you want to solve the power outage problem, you need to solve your power issues. The easiest way is a backup battery system, like a personal uninterruptible power supply (UPS) under your desk. Remember that a UPS isn’t designed to keep you running for days. It’s something that is designed to keep you going just long enough to put a plan in place or shut things down gracefully. Those batteries last for 5-7 minutes at best. And the more devices you have connected to them, the less time they can stay up.

What other devices, you might ask? Keeping your computer on a UPS is smart. What about your WAN connectivity device, like your DSL or cable modem? Have to have that if you want to stay online, right? What about your wireless access points? Are they plugged into the wall? Or are you using PoE? Did you plug the PoE switch into the UPS too? That is going to reduce the UPS runtime. Unlike a data center, your house likely doesn’t have the infrastructure to run a huge UPS with enough battery to go for half an hour. You need something that is going to fit under your desk and has a fan small enough to not create a white noise generator.

Speaking of generators, if you have regular power issues or you live in a part of the country that is prone to storms that knock out power for days on end, you need to consider a home generator. These are larger, more expensive, and require some kind of fuel source. The upside is you can run your entire house off the generated electricity until the power is restored. No need to hook things up to batteries. The down side is that your house uses a lot of power for appliances and other things and you still need to prioritize what is going to get first crack at the leftover juice. You also need to have a plan to keep the generator going. If it runs off of combustible fuel, like diesel, you need to have a supply ready to go. You also need to test it regularly to ensure it’s going to work when you need it. Just like in the enterprise data center you need to know things work before everything goes sideways.

Getting Out of Dodge

The last situation can be a combination of the above factors or something totally unrelated. What happens if your workspace isn’t usable? Maybe your power is out and your heat is gone too. Maybe your Internet is down and you need to go somewhere with a better signal in order to have that big call with the CEO. Maybe you have a tree trimming service that has set up camp outside your office window for the rest of the day and the chainsaw symphony is driving you insane. If you need to move, you need to have a plan.

Where are you going to go? A friend’s house works great, provided they are home and there isn’t a quarantine order. You could try a coffee shop, provided they aren’t closed for some reason. Maybe you’re alone in a distant city and you need to get some work done. You need to figure out what’s available and have at least two backup plans in place. Maybe you want to use a local coffee shop. Make sure they’re open and make sure you aren’t violating local laws. If they’re closed, consider somewhere more local to you. Perhaps the parking lot of a store or other place that offers wireless connectivity. There are times when those wireless setups extend a bit outside the store proper and you can borrow it there. Not everyone has a vehicle, so make sure wherever you are going is easy to reach through your preferred transit method. Oh, and if it’s a restaurant or coffee shop, make sure you tip well on your purchases as a form of “rent” for the table.

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Tom’s Take

Enterprises have DR plans in place for everything. Natural disasters, security incidents, and even good old fashioned human error all have a place in the Big Binder of Getting Back to Work. Homes don’t have that, even though they should. You need to know what has to happen to get you back to working if something goes wrong. You need to write it all down, test it thoroughly, and keep updating it as you go. Your boss may understand the first time you can’t work because your power went out or they’re doing circuit maintenance in your neighborhood. But, as an IT professional, you need to have a plan in place in case it becomes a regular occurrence. And when you do get everything ready to go for your home DR plan, make sure you update your enterprise DR plans too.