How Infosys and TCS are managing amidst the Coronavirus Pandemic

Coronavirus lockdown is now a reality in India with Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing a house arrest of 21 days for citizens across the country. While a majority of the companies have been shut down, and employees asked to work from home, technology giants like Infosys and TCS have to, without a choice, keep certain services running even amongst the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Infosys and TCS are responsible for keeping several mission-critical technology infrastructures for financial institutions, healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations as well as government and public services organizations up and functional. Therefore, although some of the TCS and Infosys employees have taken to social media about having to report to work even under these circumstances, the organizations say they have no choice.

Both organizations, through their respective websites and blogs, have provided reasons for why they have to still keep certain services operative and have also chalked out the measures they were taking to keep their employees safe.

How Infosys is Managing Amidst the Coronavirus Pandemic

Infosys says on its website that the company has advised all its employees to work from home wherever possible, and was also taking all reasonable steps to ensure continued service delivery to their clients. The company says that in areas where work from home was not possible, they are taking extensive measures to ensure the safety of employees such as increased sanitization of office premises, installation of thermal scanners, removal of biometric scanners, closure of recreational facilities, daily communication updates, restricted movements in common areas and avoiding large gatherings.

The company has also set up a dedicated helpline for employees and says that medical centres are available in the Infosys campus with access to an ambulance as well. “Nearly 70% of our global workforce is now enabled to work from home leveraging collaboration technologies to stay connected with clients and colleagues. We believe we can scale this further in the days ahead,” says UB Pravin Rao, chief operating officer, Infosys, on the company website.

“From mobilizing laptops for our workforce, desktop relocation to home environments, helping reimage personal devices for official use, with information security policies and the ability for us to minimize security risks, improving our virtual private network bandwidth and even facilitating high-speed broadband connectivity at employee residences, we are accelerating overall employee readiness to be productive as they work remotely. We are also significantly and rapidly amplifying our technology landscape to support robust and secure remote collaboration at scale,” he adds.

How TCS is Managing Amidst the Coronavirus Pandemic

Rajesh Gopinathan, CEO and Managing Director, TCS has through a blog post outlined the measures being taken at TCS to ensure safety of employees as well as continuing to support mission-critical IT backbones across the world. Gopinathan says that TCS imposed travel restrictions, advised employees to work from home, canceled events and large internal meetings, and took other such initiatives early on.

“We launched a massive program to ensure business continuity using our Secure Borderless Work Spaces infrastructure which allows TCS associates working from home, both onshore and offshore, to ensure business continuity with support from minimal associates working from offices. TCS has been a pioneer in location-independent work practices having started offshoring 50 years ago. We proactively deployed collaboration platforms, cloud-enabled infrastructure and robust security practices which stands us in good stead as we deal with this unprecedented situation,” says Gopinathan in his blog.

Gopinathan adds in his blog that it was the company’s priority to safeguard the health and well-being of its associates and employees while also keeping IT-enabled essential services running around the globe. TCS, he says, continues to power financial, healthcare, government and private institutions even under these tumultuous circumstances.