As we get used to lockdown, a new norm is appearing and the teething problems of getting staff set up to work from home have mostly been overcome.
There are, however, a few important IT points relating to security and cost efficiencies that you may not have thought about in this new remote working scenario.
There may now be gaps in your IT security
Furloughed Staff
- These people need to be disabled as per your leavers process.
- Additionally, check their out of office reply, they may not have set it or you may have a preferred message.
- If you’re on Office 365, downgrading them to ‘shared mailbox’ status will save licencing costs, and you can upgrade them when they return.
If you’re on Office 365
- Turn on Multi-Factor Authentication to increase the security of your email. nTrust clients can contact us to arrange a time to turn it on. Or contact your IT support partner and they should be able to help you.
- Consider using Microsoft Intune (unfortunately not free). This will enhance your data security further
- You have access to Teams and Sharepoint. If you’re not using them already, they’re very useful for internal collaboration and remote working.
- Are you using IM (Instant Messenger)? We surveyed our staff and they are loving this feature. It’s making everyone feel connected.
- You can use Teams to set up video meetings with external contacts, and depending on how close your relationship with a partner company, you can integrate your Teams and theirs (if they have it) so as to be able to instant message them.
Zoom
- Zoom’s free tier provides good video conferencing for 40 minutes.
- There have been concerns relating to security. Starting April 5th, Zoom has enabled passwords on meetings and turned on Waiting Rooms by default as additional security enhancements to protect privacy.
- Our advice is, if you can, use Teams
Are you relying on the IT infrastructure in your office, whilst working from home?
Openreach has declared MBORC (Matter Beyond Our Reasonable Control) for the whole country. This means they can’t access premises and they’re prioritising critical infrastructure. What does this mean for you?
- If your work broadband does go down, your IT support partner will ask someone to go in and reset it.
- However, this may not resolve the issue.
- If you have a fault on your work broadband, it’s unlikely to be fixed quickly.How can you mitigate these risks?
Consider moving as much of your company data resources from your office to a secure hosted location. This could be Sharepoint, Microsoft Azure or a datacentre.
What should you do next?
If you have any concerns about your IT infrastructure and potential security gaps, get in touch and we can run a security scan to identify areas where your system is vulnerable.
We urge you to run these checks now rather than finding out the hard way, when there has been a breach.
