Indeed, the coronavirus represents mega challenges to businesses that have been switching to a telecommuting workforce.
Widespread social-distancing, scaled back gatherings of people and stay-at-home policies to cope with the outbreak threatens business sustainability and security.
With more people working at home during the day, Internet usage has exploded. So have cyber threats, according to published reports.
Tactics must be implemented to guarantee business continuity and to secure employees’ residential systems for integrity and confidentiality.
This necessitates new approaches: 1) For your employees; 2) processes; and 3) for technology.
While not a comprehensive list, here’s an overview:
Employees
You must emphasize and re-emphasize to employees that their use of your technology in behavior, habits, judgment and procedures is critical for security to avoid cybercrime.
The tendency of some employees is think they can do things at home that they couldn’t get away with doing at the office.
This includes visiting harmful web sites, using social media and avoid being tricked by illicit voice and text phishing.
So, set up a dialogue to – not to lecture but to share best practices and why they should follow protocols.
Coronavirus Prompts Best Strategies for a Remote Workforce
You’ll want to stimulate questions and timely reporting of issues; post pop-up, universal-lock screen announcements; and communicate appropriate productivity and security techniques in file transfers and messaging on approved devices.
You should identify and monitor employees who will be handling confidential data. Watch for possible security breaches with them, such as any bulk downloading of your data.
Processes – Security Operation Center (SOC), CIA Triad
Whether or not your organization has a sophisticated SOC, know that all your stakeholders – customers, employees and suppliers – have a role to play to ensure the security, confidentiality and integrity of your enterprise’s system.
Prevent fraud in your financials and transactions by merging your SOC system with fraud data analysis to make certain you quickly spot and fix any fraudulent activities.
Understand your increases in expenses.
Is New Managing Approach Needed for Your Remote Staff?
Typically, managed security service providers and SOC tools invoice you for monitoring and/or analyzing your records.
With employees working at home, you’ll be using more bandwith so you should be able to justify increases in expenses.
As far as your CIA Triad (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) is concerned in your security objectives, help your customers solve issues.
For instance, increased levels of usage during peak periods hinders availability. So offer tips on how to lessen access issues.
Technology
It’s important, of course, to mollify cyber risk. So communicate and expedite patch processes for software, cloud interfacing, virtual private networks and end-point security.
Insist employees use multi-factor authentication (a complex password and a second authentication factor) to access applications and your network.
You can make it easier for your employees to do their work, if you make full use of cloud-based virtualized desktop solutions.
Tips for Telecommuters to Optimize Home Internet Service
Again confidentiality and integrity are vital. But consumers expect fast, real-time performance.
So you must also take precautions to upgrade your system in order to support higher-volume web traffic securely.
Your information-technology employees should install anti-distributed denial of service, fraud analytics, a network monitor, secure-sockets-layer (SSL) certification, and a web-application firewall.
From the Coach’s Corner, additional tips:
Employee Morale in Pandemic Warrants Your Leadership – Even if you’re designated as an essential business and keeping your doors open, your workers know people are losing their jobs all over the nation. So it’s important for you to maintain a healthy staff morale by taking steps to ensure they have faith and hope.
Develop a Durable Supply Chain Despite Coronavirus – There are steps you can take to alleviate the health and economic challenges to your supply chain – now – and for the future.
Information Security: How to Make the Right Choices – More than ever, businesses, government agencies and consumers are learning costly lessons about due diligence in privacy and data security. A nationally known expert tells how to make the right choices in information security.
5 Safety Measures to Prevent a Social-Network Attack – An epidemic of social-networking attacks represents unprecedented dangers to companies. Here’s how a Facebook user cost her company a $1 million loss.
Guidelines to Meet FLSA Responsibilities for Remote Workers – As an employer, you have a myriad of responsibilities under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA ) for exempt and nonexempt workers who work at home.
Technology – 6 Strategies to Prevent Data Center Downtime – Outages can cause a whole series of expensive and sometimes irreparable damage – not only for a company or government agency but the economy and human costs. Here are six solutions.
“We are now living on Internet time. It’s a new territory, and the cyber equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush is on.”
-Andy Grove
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