Infrastructure in the Year Everyone Went Home
March 2020: everyone's at home. VPN at 98% capacity. Remote Desktop servers struggling. Collaboration tools that nobody had used before suddenly mission-critical. The infrastructure that supported 500 people in an office needed to support 500 people in 500 different offices, overnight.
Week one: just keep it running
The first week was triage. VPN concentrator at capacity: add another. RDS session hosts CPU at 95%: add more. Bandwidth from the data centre insufficient for 500 concurrent remote sessions: upgrade the circuit, which means convincing a carrier to move faster than their standard four-week lead time.
Nobody asked about architecture during week one. They asked "can I work?" The answer had to be yes, or the business stopped.
Week two through four: stabilise
Once the immediate fires were out, the real work started. The VPN solution that was designed for 50 concurrent users max was now handling 450. It was stable, but barely. We needed a long-term remote access architecture.
I evaluated Azure Virtual Desktop, DirectAccess, and cloud VPN solutions. Ended up going with AVD for most users — it was the right fit for a Windows-heavy environment and integrated with the M365 licensing we already had. Deployed it over two weeks. Users who'd never used anything but their desktop PC were suddenly working from AVD sessions on their home laptops.
The biggest challenge wasn't technical. It was communication. Explaining to 500 people how to install the Remote Desktop client, how to sign in, what their desktop would look like — this took more time than the actual deployment. Technical documentation that was perfectly clear to IT was incomprehensible to the sales team. I learned to write instructions at a third-grade reading level, with screenshots. People are stressed during a pandemic. They need clarity, not completeness.
The permanent changes
A lot of the infrastructure I deployed in those first few months is still running today. Some observations:
Remote access is not an edge case anymore. It's the primary access pattern for most users. Design for it. Don't bolt it on.
Cloud file services won. On-prem file servers with VPN access were the biggest source of complaints. SharePoint and OneDrive weren't perfect, but they worked without VPN. We accelerated the file server migration that was planned for 2022. No regrets.
The office network is now a branch office. With most users remote, the office is just another access point. The data centre, the cloud, the identity provider — these are the centre now. The office is the edge.
User support is infrastructure work. I spent more time helping people with their home WiFi than I did managing servers. Not my job description, but it was my problem. The line between infrastructure and user support blurred permanently.
If there's one lesson from that year: build infrastructure for flexibility, not optimisation. You don't know what next year's crisis will be. You just know there will be one.