The current landscape has pushed many organisations to remote working. While these are extraordinary and challenging times, businesses which require employees to work remotely will still need to consider the same kind of technology and security requirements for working from home (WFH) that would be used in normal circumstances. In fact, some of these requirements will need to be dialled up to support a considerably higher volume of remote workers.

Whether your business doesn’t have a great deal of experience with remote work, or just want to make sure you are well prepared, here are just a few key considerations that our customers are asking for our support with. If you need assistance in any of these areas to ensure that your employees’ transition from the office to their home can be productive and effective, please reach out to us.

1. Secure VPN network

Remote working requires full connectivity to corporate systems and applications. As a business, you should have established a secure VPN network. This encrypted connection helps ensure that sensitive data like confidential company files are transmitted safely and prevents unauthorised people from eavesdropping on the traffic, allowing your employees to conduct work remotely. Depending on how many employees you have, the VPN endpoint can be configured in the office, at a data centre, or at multiple locations to spread the load over existing internet links.

  • **Firewall security:**Never comprise the security of your business. Consider a Next Generation Firewall with Threat Prevention, Wildfire, URL Filter and Global Protect bundled with Firewall Management that protects your network from malicious attacks, viruses, unauthorised access attempts and inappropriate use. It is important that there is increased visibility and control of access to and from your network when majority of your employees are working from home.
2. Remote system connectivity

It is important that to be able to do remote work, your business should have the right systems in place so employees can do their jobs without any disruptions. Check whether your business applications can be accessed remotely, if not, you might need a Remote Desktop solution, like Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop, AWS Workspaces or Azure Windows Virtual Desktop, to function well.

3. Capacity management

With a shift to all employees working from home, this puts pressure on your infrastructure. You should assess capacity management in multiple areas:

  • Corporate Internet: With remote users connecting over VPNs When working from home, expect traffic to be coming over the Internet instead of dedicated WAN links. So you can be assured that you have enough capacity for all users, we recommend you review and test your network connectivity and bandwidth to assess your readiness to work from homefor a 100% remote work force.
  • **Remote User Internet:**With staff not typically working from home they may not have sufficient bandwidth to remain productive. Consider offering staff an allowance to temporarily upgrade their plans or switch 4G as an alternative.
  • Infrastructure Capacity: With a larger remote workforce, the performance of systems may be impacted in different ways. You should consider whether some applications should be scaled up while others could be scaled down. Do remote desktop solutions need more compute resources for example? Another aspect to investigate is licensing, if more remote desktop or VPN licenses required to handle a dedicated full-time remote worker contingent?
4. Security
  • End user security: Beware of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Cyber criminals are already exploiting the pandemic situation and launching new attacks. Consider your processes and tools around end user device security. Are the devices secured, enabled and up to date, disks encrypted, and all the latest patches installed?
  • Endpoint security: Ensure that your end points don’t become the initial entry point to your network. They will typically be running on home networks or in Internet cafes which may not be as secure as your corporate environment. Consider products like Trend Micro Worry Free which offer Anti-virus and Anti-Malware protection as well as device control, local firewall IDP and IPS.
5. Communication and collaboration solutions

External and internal business communications should not stop just because employees are working from home. As a business, it is integral that all lines of communications are consistent to be able to deliver great customer experience. Ensure that you have the ability to facilitate inbound and outbound calling, with softphones in place. There are also other cloud-based collaboration solutions available to maintain engagement levels, such as Zoom and Slack.

6. Hardware requirements

Hardware can seem like the simplest requirement but can also be easily overlooked. It is important to understand what equipment your employees need in order to work from home. Global hardware vendors and distributors have advised of some delays in their supply chain, so it is important that your organisation considers both current and upcoming requirements as soon as possible.

Remote working is no longer a ‘nice to have’, it should be a key element of your Business Continuity Plan. At this time, you should carefully plan and assess the impact that any business requirements may have on your technology infrastructure to ensure it supports your BCP. If you would like any further information regarding these technologies or would like to test your own BCP, reach out to us so we can help support your business.