The spread of the coronavirus and social distancing mandates have forced IT professionals to navigate a precarious, but necessary, rapid transition to and support of a large remote workforce. While these precautions are absolutely critical and should be followed to ensure employee safety and slow the spread of infection, you should not take this transition lightly and jeopardize the protection of your data.
With more employees working from home, cybercriminals have more access points to penetrate networks. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the US Department of Homeland Security, has even issued an alert about unpatched VPNs being targeted. In light of this, you should ensure that your infrastructure has the proper security measures in place and that your employees can back up the data they generate from their laptops to reduce the risk of data loss.
These are certainly challenging times, and many IT teams are latvia whatsapp data navigating mysterious waters as they try to figure out how to keep business moving forward in an uncertain environment. We checked in with Sam Roguine, Director and Resident Backup and Disaster Recovery Expert at Arcserve, who shared his top tips for managing a remote workforce and maintaining business continuity:
1. Do not panic or rush before implementing security measures
When trying to enable employees to quickly start working from home, it's easy to panic and rush. This can lead to implementing limited conditions on employee laptops. So, by basically creating a multitude of "remote data centers," critical business data stored solely on individual devices will be left unprotected, with no cybersecurity, backup, or DR measures in place.
What you should do is install centrally managed, cloud-based cybersecurity solutions that integrate enhanced detection and response, ransomware protection, firewall, and many other features to ensure remote access. Failing to do so will undoubtedly put your organization at risk. When remote workers use laptops at home, there is a whole new set of devices operating within the same network, significantly increasing the attack surface that cybercriminals can exploit. So make sure you cover all endpoints.
2. Backup Office 365
Many users assume that cloud-based SaaS apps, such as O365, are automatically backed up. This is a common misconception.
Investing in third-party remote backup tools is essential to mitigate the risk of data loss when employees start working from home (or even when they don’t!). Cloud-to-cloud backup and DR solutions with centralized management are ideal for remote work contexts, which is especially important since most of these workers may not have adequate security and data protection measures in place at home.