Covid-19 coronavirus Delta outbreak: Whanganui organisations move online

Between 7pm and 10pm on Tuesday, Alarm Watch answered 600 incoming calls and made 800 outgoing ones. Photo / Bevan Conley

With Whanganui and New Zealand set to be in alert level 4 for the immediate future, local security and IT organisations have had to scramble to ensure all their online systems are running smoothly.

Security outfit Alarm Watch, which monitors more than 25,000 alarms around the country, had all hands on deck as it helped businesses prepare for the lockdown.

General manager Wade Coneybeer said the sudden announcement on Tuesday afternoon gave them very little time to do what they needed to before the country went into lockdown at midnight.

"The last lockdown didn't affect us because there was more time, so businesses had more time to get out and prepare, whereas this was three short, sharp hours.

"It just spun out of control really quickly."

Between 7pm and 10pm on Tuesday, Alarm Watch answered 600 incoming calls and made 800 outgoing ones.

"Around 95 per cent of the businesses we look after are in Auckland," Coneybeer said.

"Wednesday we were very busy. We had a huge influx of alarm activations, all day pretty much. But now it's very quiet as people are at home.

"Wednesday I think there was a bit of a hangover of people going into work to quickly grab things and also the sensors being activated in a time they weren't being used."

New Zealand Computing Solutions director Greg Nixon said this move into level 4 was a lot easier than in 2020.

"Last time, we were buying every laptop we could find. Whereas this time, people had their laptops and things, it was more about getting them online. It has been a pretty crazy few days."

He said a number of businesses had old systems which made it difficult to access cloud storage, enabling them to work from home.

"They need to be able to access their office. So we have a lot of people that use terminal servers remotely and they are just overloaded at the moment and a bit slow. So we are just trying to beef everything up to make it go faster."

Dealing with IT systems, cloud storage and cybersecurity, Nixon said they've been steady this whole week, but he thought it would slow down once people were all set up.

"The main thing at the moment is ensuring people working from home are using security properly. The amount of cybersecurity attacks that have been going on, we are protecting them from that point of view.

"A lot of people do have laptops they have taken home, but they are taking them into an environment where kids are on the internet. We are just upping our game in terms of monitoring everything to make sure nothing dodgy is going on."