Since the pandemic started millions have managed to work from home. Will this continue whilst lockdown continues to ease and the country starts ‘getting back to work’? Will we have to deal with remote workforces more once this is all over?
The general population seems to think so and UK bosses are tending to agree. Surveys from YouGov, ICM and independent surveys from across the country (and in the States too) all come out with very similar results.
With 4/5ths of the population expecting to work from home at least one day a week in the future it’s going to be hard to deny the people what they want and that means we need to start planning for the inevitable.
The Threat
As more people leave the office to work from home or in public spaces we have a lot more to worry about in the backup and security industry. Here’s just a few:
- Users logging in to unsecured networks
- Loss of property
- Lack of control over updating machines
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- Outdated OS
- Outdated AV
- Lack of backups
- Lack of control over installed programs
- Lack of monitoring
There’s a lot for us to think about now, so what’s the solution?
The Solution
There are some things that are unavoidable. Users are always going to find ways to mess things up, like losing a device or opening something they shouldn’t. That’s where we all come in, mitigating the ‘disaster’.
Regular backups to the cloud are obviously the first thing everyone should have in place as the last line of defence should a disaster strike. If a machine gets cryptolockered or work is lost in any other way, be it through loss of equipment, accidental deletion or anything else, the backup will always be there to get you back up and running fast. We wrote a post back in April detailing backup options for cloud backup for a remote workforce.
The next step is protecting machines from everything else. The first line of defence if you will. This is the antivirus solution you choose. You could ask home users to download free antivirus software, but how much control do you have over this? Can you be sure they are keeping it up to date and more importantly, can the software meet the requirements?
Vitanium are using Panda, the next generation of antivirus software. Not only does it cover everything that normal antivirus programs cover by using a blacklist of known executables that contain viruses, it protects from unknown viruses too. Panda uses a blacklist and a whitelist. They have a huge database of executables known to be trustworthy and this is growing all the time as any unknown executables are sent to advanced machine learning for classification.
On top of Panda’s advanced protection, they also have modules that can be included in the package. One useful module we use at Vitanium is patch management. We can ensure all of our users are on the most up to date version of software to be certain we are not susceptible to vulnerabilities that have already been patched.
On top of everything else, Panda also offers state-of-the-art encryption.
One of the most efficient ways to minimise data exposure is to automatically encrypt the hard disks of desktops, laptops and servers, preventing unauthorised users from accessing the encrypted information without authentication. This policy provides an additional layer of security and control for organizations, although it may also lead to data control and recovery issues if the key is lost.
Panda Full Encryption leverages BitLocker, a proven and stable Microsoft technology, to encrypt and decrypt disks without impacting end users and providing organizations with the added value of centrally controlling and managing the encryption keys stored on Panda Security’s cloud-based management platform: Aether