Focusing on ways to help your business navigate the uncertain landscape brought upon by COVID-19 is not easy. But as we focus on the numerous tasks at hand, we at OCD Tech would like to remind you to continue to be vigilant when it comes to protecting your organizations from a data breach.
First and foremost, remind employees to be even more suspicious about emails, their true origination, links they contain, and the information that may be asking for.
- Pull out your business continuity plan and make sure it is current
- Ask your IT support staff to verify that backups are working and test a sample of restores to confirm
- Ensure you have enough VPN licenses for your employees to remotely connect back to the office
- Ensure your VPN/firewall can handle the bandwidth of the entire office being remote
- When in the office, your download speed is an important factor, but when everyone is remote, that turns into upload speed. Make sure you have enough bandwidth from your internet service provider (ISP) to handle it.
- If employees are using their home computers for work purposes to connect to your network, ensure that they are protected before allowing them to connect to your network.
- Secure all personal machines to meet MA 201 CMR 17 data privacy rules if the employees now have client personal sensitive information.
- If you allow employees to use remote access software such as Citrix, to access internal applications, ensure that you have enough licenses.
- Consider installing a mobile device management program that requires new devices to be put in quarantine and approved by IT before connecting to o365. Determine if your IT staff has the bandwidth to approve 25-50-100+ devices all at once.
- Determine how will you communicate with employees and/or clients. Consider using voice/video conferencing applications such as WebEx/Zoom/join.me.
