Time and resources of the essence during the ramp up to remote working in 2020. But hindsight is now showing that the biggest trade-offs made were against the finer points of remote working IT security.
Most businesses’ number-one priority, and necessarily so, was just to get people and resources connected and productive. But the majority of in-office IT security provisions are not built on the assumption that resources will even need to be taken offsite or accessed remotely, much less used from home.
There are a number of critical IT security steps that must now be revisited to wrap some better protections around your remote workforce and reduce your attack surface. Circling back to remote working security now will also shore up your protections to make sure you can securely transition your devices and people BACK into the office, and out again in the future if we need to do it all again.
Long before COVID-19 many businesses were, in varying degrees, moving towards offering or embedding some form of remote working flexibility in their workplaces.
This was largely driven by changing workforce demands, the newfound flexibility that a new generation of cloud technologies, mobile devices and better internet connectivity offered, not to mention the new work-life balance demands of new generations of employees.
If you happened to be part of an IT team or work as a business services manager pre-COVID-19, you probably had some experience already in preparing laptops for staff to use remotely, and setting up mobile phones with access to company data for travelling team members, or for team members who work remotely.
But these are all very different scenarios to what we have seen over recent months where almost overnight Australia-wide whole businesses were literally were required to down tools, shut up shop, and regroup – remotely – from home.
Even organisations with robust business continuity plans in place most likely had not planned for a scenario where:
“Remote working comes with it’s own unique set of benefits and challenges. With many businesses considering whether they will return to their office premises in the short term at all irrespective of COVID-19, now is the time to consolidate what we’ve learnt from ramping up to remote working fast and at scale and look for ways businesses can leverage remote working to thrive, securely and productively, in a new kind of business normal. ” Joe Ciancio, Managing Director Maxsum Consulting
(normally valued at $3000)
We’ll conduct a comprehensive review of your remote working IT security set-up, benchmark it against best practice, and provide actionable advice on how to cover off on what you’ve missed so that you can
Maxsum is offering a Circle Back to IT Security: Remote Working IT Security Review for a very limited time only.
Contact Us Today to take advantage of a fixed-fee review of your current remote working set-up:
Call 1300 629 786 or contact us now for a call back to get your review started!
More critical than ever before in light of COVID-19 – Cybersecurity awareness training is the best way to provide your remote working team with the knowledge they need to fight phishing with force.
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It sounds great in theory – but there’s more to making remote working work than meets the eye!