Are Your Remote Workers Secure?
When the COVID-19 crisis hit, it hit fast.
Despite what, in retrospect, may have seemed like a gradual build-up, it was virtually over the course of a single weekend in March that businesses across the US had pivoted to a remote work model.
Obviously, the first priority was maintaining business continuity. You needed to make sure your new remote workers had the technology and the remote access necessary to do their work. Your IT department, whether internally or outsourced, probably managed that as effectively as any other.
But did their process end there?
Are You Confident In Your Remote Security?
Even though the first process of deploying a remote workforce was complete, that doesn’t mean your IT department’s job was done. What about security?
Cybercrime is even more of a concern in the remote working environment during this pandemic. CISA has issued a warning to US businesses about the increase in phishing and other social engineering scams over the past few weeks. CNN is reporting a 500% increase in phishing attacks since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These attacks are exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic, targeting unsecured users working from home, and offering false information about the crisis to take advantage of them.
If you don’t have a robust cybersecurity strategy set up, you’re not alone. For most IT departments, the transition had to happen fast. But now that remote work is here to stay – at least for the foreseeable future – it’s important to secure those environments.
tca SynerTech’s Triage Process Keeps Clients Secure
To help our clients get a remote workforce in operation and keep them secure, we followed our “triage” approach to business continuity. In the face of a crisis like the pandemic, the idea is to get them up and running as fast as possible, then fine-tune security in the background.
That is, we get them out of the ER and then make further secondary improvements. In this case, after we made sure our clients had access to their work and could stay productive at home via a VPN, we moved on to fine-tuning vital cybersecurity protections in the background:
- Refine VPN configurations to make sure each user only had access to the machine and data they needed.
- Stop all ports, except the proper port for RDP, to further streamline their processes and eliminate vulnerabilities.
- Implement 2-Factor Authentication to protect the authentication process, and prevent cybercriminals that had stolen passwords from gaining access to sensitive data.
- Secure additional remote tools as needed, on a case-by-case basis.
Is Your IT Department Taking Care Of Your Remote Security?
If you’re not confident that your IT department is taking care of your remote security, make sure you have a conversation with them about cybersecurity. If you need assistance with this task, tca SynerTech is here to help.
To get the process of securing your remote workers started, click here to reach one of our representatives or call (269) 428-7000 today.
