Work From Home Phase 2: Optimize

As many of our customers, I am sure many of you are now working from home (if you can) and getting used to the new [temporary] normal. We wanted to provide a couple of tips and tricks to provide a better (and more secure) experience.

Collaboration: Many companies have made available full collaboration suite to their employees, use them! Be social, create a couple of channels for non work topics if you want to. In times like these, it is often good to [slightly] over communicate. For the same reason you facetime grandma more often now, reach out to a colleague and have a non-work conversation (pro tip ice breaker: toilet paper store stocks update, everyone can relate). MS Teams makes is quite easy to manage multiple conversation streams, let us know if you need help to leverage it.

Add video! Video is a great way to stay connected, especially with physical distancing, its fun to see other faces! Our favorite webcam right now is the Logitech Brio, it is MS Teams certified and has the added benefit of supporting Windows Hello for simple and secure logins.

Better sound: Laptop speakers and mic “work”, but when you have multiple people on a conference call, it can get hard to hear and when every call is a conference call, it gets old fast. A simple business class USB wired headset (like the Logitech H570e) will make all your calls crystal clear (assuming you are using a digital phone platform for your calls). If you want, you can also splurge they are fancier ones that add active noise cancelling, Bluetooth to get calls on your Smartphone and exceptional sound to listen to music while working between calls (like the Logitech Zone). You may want to make sure it is certified for the platform you are using (not a showstopper, but it makes the overall experience simpler/better).

Ergonomics:  Although you may have left your fancy desk chair at the office it is not a reason to not have a proper work position, try to sit straight, you might need to raise your laptops on a couple of books and may want to consider using an external keyboard and mouse.

Remote access to work:

• Part 1: For many, remote works means VPN, but do you really need it? With today’s collaboration tools, you can share documents (you can even work simultaneously on same document) and with many tools being web based, a web browser may be all you need.
• Part 2: If that is not enough, you should explore “partial” VPN options, like proxying or encapsulating Web or Remote Desktop traffic. This way, the remote worker gets the service they need, without having to connect to the entire network potentially exposing it to home network born attacks.
• Part 3: And if you really need VPN, well do it! But make sure the source PC is as secure as possible (we published another blog on this here )

Secure the endpoints: It’s not because a device is not in your office that it should not be secured, at a minimum, make sure it is patched and running a Next Generation Anti Malware, if your current platform cannot do it or you do not know how, we made our basic level security available for free for the next 6 months for those who need it ( here ).

Phone System: If you have one of those older phone system (PBX) you may not be able to receive calls on your business phone number while working from home. We have successfully deployed Microsoft Phone System on top or in parallel or existing PBX to solve this, contact us for details.

Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) everywhere: Passwords are so 2019, with the increased in cyber attacks and companies opening their systems to the Internet, MFA is now a must. If a system contains data or allows you to access data, enable MFA on it. All those cloud platforms you use have it, you just need to turn it on (if it does not have that feature, it might be time to switch to a vendor that takes data security seriously).

Special Zoom advisory: Make sure you are running the latest version, password protect your meeting, use waiting rooms, once everyone is in you can also lock your meeting, you can read more for the Zoom blog here (Zoom also released a special advisory for teachers here ).

Thanks all!

Lo?c