PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
Following on from BullGuard CEO Paul Lipman’s article earlier this week in which he highlighted how important cybersecurity is during the COVID-19 crisis, here, Brigantia Partners Commercial Director Iain Shaw outlines what your organisation do to avoid being a soft target.
I have just read Paul Lipman’s PCR article about the threats around working from home during this quarantine. I agree: the threats are increasing and becoming more targeted, while organisations are becoming more vulnerable. Many people taking decisions about how to handle this are a few years behind and think that just having an antivirus product on an endpoint provides all the security that they need – they are very, very wrong.
From the point of view of an organisation, you have to work out how to get your people onto your systems remotely and in a safe manner so as to protect your business. Do not assume that just because you are in crisis-mode that dropping your network security “will be fine for a little while” because the criminals out in the world will be attempting to “make hay whilst the sun shines”. They will know that companies may be compromised during such a time and they will be trying to take advantage of this by looking for softer targets.
What can your organisation do to avoid being a soft target in troubled times? There are several options which we can look more closely at:
- Ensure that your staff have been trained with KnowBe4 so that they can spot when they are being socially engineered, phished etc. Such training will work just as well at home as it does in the office;
- Provide ISL Online so that your staff are not processing your data at home but rather are accessing everything remotely on their work PCs which still sit on your network, behind all the protection that you normally have in place;
- Use bluedog Office 365 monitoring, along with the bluedog SOC on your network so that if any malicious / suspicious activity takes place, you get to find out about it quickly so that you can take whatever action is required;
- Protect all of your email traffic with the Email Laundry. This way regardless of what devices your staff are using to pick up their email, you know that it has been scanned and is therefore much safer than normal;
- This is the common sense one that most businesses seem to forget about: Ensure that the computers that your staff use at home are safe. To put this simply, add the home PCs onto your business Heimdal license. Even during normal operation of your business, why on Earth would it seem like a good idea to have potential breaches taking place in your employees’ homes? You may not even know how much damage such a breach can be until it is too late; just ensure that they all have Heimdal suite installed and you can sleep that bit easier at night. After all, in more normal times, do you emphatically know that members of your staff have not worked on anything confidential on their home PCs?
- The final item on this list is Mi Crow which provides online Microsoft Office training. The reason for that is that many employees only make the minimum usage of the Office suite, often missing out such great tools as MS Teams: which can host chat, share documents, work collaboratively and host meetings.
Please email partnersupport@brigantia.com or call Brigantia on 020 3358 0090 for more information. It would be a good idea to not put this off for another day as you cannot afford to have your business network breached in what is already a very difficult time.
Like this content? Sign up for the free PCR Daily Digest email service to get the latest tech news straight to your inbox. You can also follow PCR on Twitter and Facebook.
Read the latest edition of PCR’s monthly magazine below:
