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Smart Computing Practices While in This Extended Work from Home Environment

It is a balancing act juggling functionality, ease of use, and security while we have all been working remotely during these unprecedented times. Following are a couple of quick tips for review to make sure you’re keeping yourself and your organization secure while online and working from home.

  1. Use your company issued laptop exclusively when working on company information. It should have the proper antivirus and security components installed to keep you working secure. One great example of such a security component is Cisco’s Umbrella cloud delivered security protection, safeguarding your movements from malware and ransomware while navigating the internet.
  2. Policy, Procedures, and Training are even more important in our current environment. Be sure to implement, update, and adhere to administrative controls to reduce cyber risk by following regular password change guidelines and training protocol. If your organization has enrolled you in a security awareness training program such as KnowBe4, make sure to stay up to date with the modules and trainings. Email phishing is still one of the most common attack vectors, and it only takes one wrong click to encrypt an organization’s entire dataset. If you are in-charge of IT for your organization and have not yet implemented a security awareness training program, consider doing so as soon as possible; it provides exceptional value at a low cost.
  3. Use a password manager to keep you more secure. Always use unique passwords. Password managers can help as they will often create unique strong passwords for you and store them in an encrypted format. Examples include 1Password, Keeper, Lastpass, and Bitwarden.
  4. Use the tools your organization has provided such as VPN, secure file access, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Remote Desktop. Enterprise systems should have backups and the ability to restore should a problem occur. Make sure your Windows, MAC, Android, and Apple smartphones are set to alert and automatically update the operating system (OS). Stay away from using personal accounts for passing work data back and forth as this only exposes you and the information to additional unknowns.
  5. Keep your organization on track to embrace cloud computing. Hopefully, your organization has started down the road to cloud computing, enabling easy, secure access to data that allows you to efficiently perform your job. If it hasn’t or is in varying degrees of transition, start or keep the momentum. Software as a Service, such as Microsoft 365, can be implemented in phases and greatly increase productivity and security. As many organizations have, transitioning email to online Microsoft 365 is the easiest initial entry point. Greater functionality can be gained leveraging the entire Microsoft 365 stack, from collaboration with Teams to secure, ubiquitous file access with OneDrive and SharePoint.

Written by Brian Sheehan, Executive Vice President, DelCor







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