Founded in 2016, through an incubator at IIT-Madras, QNu Labs is India’s first and only Quantum-resilience Company that provides unconditional security products and solutions for the Cloud and the Internet. The firm makes encryption future proof with the use of quantum technologies. Sunil Gupta, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, QNu Labs and Arun Goyal, Executive Vice President & Business Head – IMEA, QNu Labs, tell us how their firm is weathering the Covid 19 crisis
A large part of our work is hardware centric which requires special labs and equipments to carry out development, testing and production. We had to prioritise the work of our engineers to focus on activities that can be done remotely or Work from Home (WFH).
For example, we decided to spend time on improving and completing design and production documentation, training on our staff, accelerate work on our IPs – patents and trademarks which were getting delayed earlier. Since most of the software work can be easily done remotely, we prioritized and expedited progress on those work packages and features.
To address BCP, we have implemented backup plan on cloud and on physical tape, for all desktop and servers on Monthly/Weekly/Daily basis, across the organization. A role base access have been extended to critical applications/database through vpn to the concerned employees. Official laptops were issued to the employees to WFH. Employees have been using Google hangout for audio video calls and presentation/ document reviews.
Key lessons learnt
One of the main lessons we learnt is that unexpected events do and will happen in the business and our understanding of the reality and coming to terms with quickly is important and more important is to realize that instead of worrying or waiting for things to improve, use the crisis as an opportunity to be creative and focus the energies on lot of other things such as writing blogs/articles, reaching out to your network etc.
We have used tools such as WA, Slack, Webex, Zoom to communicate and collaborate with team and the ecosystem.
While WFH was always possible but people hesitated to use it as they are more comfortable with face to face interaction and there was also a mental block that people won’t be productive in WFH scenario. But this forced WFH has broken the mental barrier and it is being realized that WFH can also be effective in a lot of scenarios if it is planned well and right tools are used for collaboration. In fact I think the productivity might be higher over a week as 15-20 hours of travel time will be saved.
Exceptional post however , I was wanting to know if you could write a litte more on this topic?
I’d be very grateful if you could elaborate a little bit more.
Thank you!