Employers across the United States may be faced with their toughest challenges this fall if the swine flu becomes an epidemic in any part of the country. If you haven't developed a contingency plan for what you should be doing if the prediction becomes fact, now is the time to get a game plan together that relies on IT to keep your business operating.

The biggest question is whether your employees can telecommute from home. Is your firm prepared to handle a large number of telecommuters? Is your computer system secure, and are your workers trained to deal with offsite work?

This flu could cause major disruptions in the workplace. The federal government predicts there could be as many as 90,000 deaths from the Swine Flu. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that many workers will be staying at home because they or their kids are sick.

Ideally, companies should already have policies spelling out whether employees can take sensitive information out of the office, and under what conditions. But will a swine flu alert make it harder for workers to get to the data they need and keep working from home?

Your company also has to decide whether employees will be allowed to use non-company computers to work from home, and if they cannot, it means you will have to provide a lot of laptops you may not have.

For more on preparing for the swine flu:
- check out this NetworkWorld.com article

Related Article:
Firms consider telework plans as pandemic concerns grow