Semi-Lockdown: Adjusting to the New Normal

Just like any other organization over the past week, Binx had to adjust to the new normal. What a week it has been! We hope that you and your beloved ones are in good health and spirit, and that you are in control of your business. Here’s an update of how we at Binx are coping with this abrupt change to our business.

It is my belief that the current situation will have a lasting impact on the way that business is done. By sharing our experiences, I’d like to give you an insight in what we are going through and the changes that we’ve made. If you have any other ideas or experiences to share, please let me know!

Decentralizing the Organization

In just one week, we have transformed into a decentralized company. For a business that is focused entirely on consultancy and training, working from home is quite the change. What didn’t change, is our commitment to help our clients make the most effective use of cloud technology.
Over the last week, we’ve been in close contact with many of our clients to look for creative and flexible solutions, so they can ensure their business continuity. Many of our clients have felt the immediate impact of the COVID-19 measures and it is great to see the solidarity and a ‘we can do this together’-mentality that has blossomed over the past few days.

Our IT Infrastructure

As a cloud-born consultancy and training boutique, we were set-up for a remote way of working from the start of our organization two years ago. Our cloud consultants work with the latest hardware and online tools. Luckily, most of them have already invested in a proper setup at their home office. If not, we support our consultants with this. Our business applications, mostly GSuite, are running in the cloud.

We even allowed a few that got fed up with working from their kitchen chairs to borrow our office chairs!

Keeping the Team Aligned

For the team, we have regular Q&A sessions to keep everyone aligned and informed. We also do regular check-ins in the evening for the team to blow off some steam.
Our bi-weekly Xebia knowledge exchanges have been changed into virtual events. Normally, these XKEs take place from 4PM to 9PM every other Tuesday. The virtual XKE took place from 7PM to 9PM with four half-hour slots. There was even a 30-minute pre-recorded bootcamp to warm-up. 😉

Supporting our Clients

Our clients also see the impact of the Coronavirus on their business. Think of online travel agent Booking.com, flower auction Royal FloraHolland, cinema company Pathé, and all those other organizations that are hit by the semi-lockdown in the Netherlands.
Over the past week, we have focused primarily on keeping our clients cloud operations steady. Besides, we have increased our efforts to review and optimize the cost of workloads, brought our training curriculum online, and implemented managed cloud control for clients to support their mission-critical teams.

Keeping clients steady

We continue to help our clients to keep steady in these turbulent times by providing extra flexibility and creativity in the way that we are working with them.
Many of our consultants, much like the teams at our clients, have young families; the extra flexibility to work when they are able to focus, while also appreciating family commitments ensures that the work gets done and both our clients and employees are kept happy!

Cost Optimization

In these times, cost optimization is on the top of everyone’s agenda. We see that in nearly every cloud infrastructure there are things to improve, often leading to thousands of euros in monthly cost savings!

At Binx we are asked to review cloud workloads a lot. For these reviews, we look at the implementation of many aspects, like automation and security and advice on best-practices and remediation.
To support organizations in these trying times, we are conducting free consultation on potential cost reduction and optimization for cloud workloads on Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. If you are running workloads on the cloud, please feel free to ask us to do a free review on potential cost optimization.

Online Cloud Training

We understand that individuals and teams alike are still looking to develop their skills. For some, reskilling is more important today than before. With physical attendance of classroom training impossible, we have moved our entire curriculum online.
We are offering a complete curriculum of online cloud engineering training courses, offered through Xebia Academy.

Google Cloud Training

Wietse Venema, who is writing an O’Reilly book on Building Serverless applications with Google Cloud Run, is offering an online training for application developers to get going on Google Cloud. This training takes place on Friday, April 10th from 1PM CET until 5PM CET.

Amazon Web Services Training

Furthermore, we have complete and free hands-on learning journeys for AWS available on Instruqt.

Managed Cloud for Organizations

For some organizations, especially the ones with many external consultants, team size has been cut down to the bare minimum. We understand how stressful it can be if you’re the one responsible for mission-critical infrastructure. For those teams, being able to rely on managed cloud support can be more valuable than ever. We help organizations to implement cloud control, providing support and automating all the processes to the extreme.
We believe that especially in these times it is crucial to become as efficient and agile as possible. Adopting a cloud-native way of working contributes heavily to this. We are here to help you get there.
Let’s hope things take a turn for the better again soon. Take care.