Learning from COVID-19: Security and Continuity Planning

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced almost all organizations to adopt new practices such as remote working and social distancing. It has altered people’s lives in both small and enormous ways. The governments are reconsidering ways to ensure the stability of their countries by developing and implementing new economic plans. As the world is more focused on the health and economic aspects of nations, this has helped cybercriminals to benefit from this crisis.

Even though the work-from-home concept is not new, with the pandemic in the picture, it has raised some new challenges and it would require some serious continuity planning on its front.

Hence, with our new blog we would like to bring forward some strategies for continuity planning for enterprises during and post the pandemic.

Remote working challenges

We’re going to look at two common remote work challenges and solutions to overcome them.

VPN Capacity:

With more people working from home, there is a massive increase in the traffic online.This sudden rise has led a lot of organizations to search and allocate licenses for their employees. Now the major challenge is that without VPN access, the employees will not be able to access information and resources, and might ultimately end up using illegal methods or pirated licenses leading to a possible cybersecurity breach.

Issues with increased Bandwidth:

Video conferencing applications consume a lot of internet and with the majority of the families accessing one common internet connection, so this helps attackers target such networks easily. Homes with more internet consumption have seen a higher rate of attacks.

WHY IS CONTINUITY PLANNING AND BUSINESS PREPAREDNESS IMPORTANT

These unprecedented times, call for a plan to be prepared to deal with such situations. More than 90 percent of organizations have moved to remote working and have employees accessing information from multiple servers. A plan can help organizations prepare and sustain such complicated situations.It also instills trust within the community and everyone associated with the organization.

Questions you need to ask while making a plan:

• Does your organization have enough VPN access?
• Does the organization have enough devices to conduct day-to-day operations?
• Do you have enough finances to sustain all remote operations?
• Is any form of training required?
• Do your employees have the required internet access?

Tips to improve your organization’s cybersecurity structure and productivity

When working to improve your organization’s security posture, there are several best practices that you can implement. Below are four best practices you can use to improve your organization’s security structure and productivity.

1. Be clear about expectations and responsibilities: We have low face-to-face interactions with the employees, it becomes difficult to communicate the right expectations out of any project. The internet is impacted due to rains and high usability, it sometimes becomes extremely difficult to maintain consistency. Regular follow ups and dashboards for projects help in maintaining efficiency and clarity with deadlines.
2. Create an awareness about the importance of being cyber secure: There has been an increase in spam and phishing attacks during COVID-19 pandemic which has made employees vulnerable to attacks. Hackers use these techniques to manipulate your employees and access your network. As an organization, you should encourage employees to communicate about such attacks or even let their managers know if they get a hint as well.
3. VPN accessibility: VPNs mask your internet protocol (IP) address so your online actions are virtually untraceable. Most important, VPN services establish secure and encrypted connections to provide greater privacy than even a secured Wi-Fi hotspot.This directly helps individuals and businesses to send and receive data security over the internet.
4. Use of DNS Filtering — Keeping users safe as they navigate the Internet is more difficult when they are connecting from outside of your network. With employees stuck at home, chances are good that company laptops will be used for a hefty amount of personal web surfing and email checking. Cloud-based DNS filtering makes it possible to block connections and limit access to the risky areas of the Internet. Clicks on malicious links or attempts to connect to domains related to phishing and malware can be prevented, without having to use a VPN.

Contact us for an exhaustive demo on how we can help secure your IT infrastructure.

Blog by: Kaustuv Dwivedi