Digitalization During the Pandemic — What We Learned in Three Months

March 2020. On Friday, we left the office “for a few days.” It’s June and most of the team is still working from home. What changed in those three months? Everything. And surprisingly, much of it for the better.

Week 1: Panic and VPN¶

Our VPN was sized for 20 concurrent connections. On Monday morning, 150 people connected. It crashed. Crisis meeting (over the phone, because nobody knew how to use Teams yet). By Wednesday, we had a new VPN infrastructure running on Azure — auto-scaling, split tunneling, MFA.

Lesson: disaster recovery plans had a “data center fire” section, but not an “everyone works from home” one. That will change.

Weeks 2-4: Remote Work Infrastructure¶

What worked immediately: Git, Jenkins, JIRA, Confluence — all cloud-based or accessible via VPN. What didn’t work: the phone system (on-premise), printers (hard to use remotely), signing processes (paper + stamp).

Microsoft Teams deployment in 5 days for the entire company. Not ideal, but it worked. Training on Teams via Teams — meta, but necessary.

Clients: “We Need It NOW”¶

Insurance company: online claims submission — from “planned for next year” to “needed in a month.” MVP in 3 weeks, React frontend, REST API, electronic signature. Not perfect, but functional. Clients sent damage photos from their phones instead of by mail. Satisfaction higher than with the paper process.

Bank: expanding online banking with features that were previously “branch-only.”