Coping with the Lockdown

How we’re trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy during the Covid-19 crisis

#flatteningthecurve #physicaldistancing #keeptheeconomygoing

The last few weeks have brought some changes with them. Like many of you, we’ve also decided to enable and promote work from home wherever possible. You’d think this would be easy for a cybersecurity company. But, for many reasons – especially cybersecurity related ones – we haven’t allowed it until now. The situation changed last week, when we decided to keep our employees safe by #physicaldistancing, doing our part to #flattenthecurve, and to continue to serve and support our customers to #keeptheeconomygoing.

At Securosys, we responded to the Covid-19 outbreak by enabling secure access from home, scheduling regular online meetings, creating a daily morning video greeting from the CEO, and posing a challenge to all our employees. Let’s see what that entailed.

Giving external access to employees increases the cybersecurity risk manifold. After all, you have to open up your firewall by making holes in it. We’ve tried to reduce the danger by giving everybody access to a VPN. The VPN client certificates were created in our internal PKI solution (SwissPKI), which is integrated with our own Primus HSM in Securosys’ CloudsHSM. The distribution of the VPN configuration bundles and certificates to the remote personnel was handled by SecureSafe. Now we’re constantly monitoring VPN access and logging it. By rolling out softphones and integrating them into the telephone system, we ensured availability by phone line as well.

Those are only some of the measures we put in place to protect our work. If you didn’t understand the nerd-talk here that’s normal. Basically, it all boils down to keeping our systems safe. If you want help with setting up a secure setup like ours, let us know – we can help you directly or point you towards the right partners.

While the technical side was taken care of pretty quickly, making sure our employees were all right posed a different challenge. At Securosys we’re used to having lots of social interaction in the office. We like to talk to each other, be it about new features, coding questions, marketing, or sales issues. Our discussions can be quite lively, but they usually lead to quick resolutions.

How can we recreate this with our remote setup? While we already sent secure text messages via Threema, we decided to also use Zoom for video conferences. We have a few paid accounts, but the free version is sufficient for quick interactions. Quite often we’re able to resolve little things right away through these video calls. We also decided to have a few additional meetings while working from home. In the mornings and evenings, we now have short “standup” sessions where we just chat and see how everybody is doing. We use video and joke about the cleanliness of a shave or the T-shirts people are wearing (as opposed to our usual dress shirts). It’s almost like being at work.

Except it isn’t.

Much more care must be taken in personal interaction. A quick text message can easily be misunderstood. Rather than just being fast, it pays off to take the extra time to video chat. People are working by themselves, alone, we don’t want them to feel more isolated than necessary.

Another issue we encountered was the cancellation of many events. Due to the Covid-19 crisis we had to postpone our own Partner Sales Conference. To avoid delaying everything, we decided to run a two-hour meeting via Zoom instead. In that webinar we were able to introduce over 40 partners from five different continents to our latest products and solutions. Zoom was able handle it well – including a Q&A at the end. All other presentations on new features and products we had planned to give were recorded and distributed to the partners for download and individual study.

Finally, we came up with the idea of a challenge to learn or do something new. We told our employees to take half an hour every day – the time you save from not commuting – to do that thing you never found the time for. Learn Italian, start playing the guitar (the challenge I chose – and trust me, it’s a challenge), take that online Yoga class, learn to balance on a slackline, whatever. After all, now is your chance to do these things!

It’s important to us that everyone at our company stays in good spirits despite the difficult times. This crisis is still evolving, and many are directly affected or worried about others who are. It’s understandable that it might be hard to focus, and allowances have to be made for that. With all these measures we’re not only trying to keep our employees on track, but also to help them avoid feeling isolated while they’re not in the office. Sometimes an online happy hour can be enough to lighten the mood or just take your mind off things.

Every business is dealing with unexpected changes. We’re taking a huge leap into digital work without really having prepared for it. Some even call it the biggest step in digital transformation. While we’ve managed to find a way forward at Securosys, we don’t want anybody to be left behind. If we work together, we’ll hopefully be able to keep the economy going while coping with the crisis we’re in.

Feel free to let us know how we can help you!

#flatteningthecurve #physicaldistancing #keeptheeconomygoing

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Robert Rogenmoser (RoRo) is the CEO and co-founder of Securosys, a leader in cyber and blockchain security, serving customers with its HSM network appliances (and cloud service) all over the world.

You can connect with him directly or reach him via email: roro (at) securosys (dot) ch

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