Some carriers have said that if broadband customers who need to work from home sign up in advance of a pandemic, there should be enough network capacity in the event of quarantines.

But "that's not necessarily true," Robert said. His company is taking into consideration the distances between the homes of critical workers and the central offices of their broadband providers. One goal of the ongoing research is to help company officials decide how many more laptops and VPNs need to be deployed.

Robert doesn't care whether the odds of a pandemic occurring are low or high. "Business continuity planners don't look at cause so much as effect," he said. "So whether there's a fire or a bomb or a pandemic, [if] the building is out, the workforce has to be disseminated." The biggest difference might be that the period of disruption could last longer during a pandemic than it would during another event, he added.

However, Desouza noted that a pandemic could produce "things that we did not predict, which can combine to cause problems we didn't imagine."

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