Several months ago, many of us may have been planning to be back in the office by September. As summer slowly comes to an end, we’re seeing that won’t be the case for a while.
In fact, a number of companies have announced that employees will not return to the office this year including Twitter, Google and Amazon.
If your company is looking at modeling the same timeline, what does that mean for your IT department? Let’s take a look at recent statistics.
In May, 46% of businesses surveyed by IT security firm Barracuda Networks reported they experienced at least one security incident since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, with more than half (51%) recording an increase in the number of email phishing attacks.
Knowing about the attacks is just half the battle. According to another cybersecurity survey in April, 15% of respondents indicated their IT department doesn’t have the resources they need to support a remote workforce, while another 34% said they do, but only for the time being.
As companies continue to work remotely, IT teams play a critical role. Below are priorities every company should be reviewing with the head of their IT department.
More employee trainings
If you haven’t talked to your employees about threats they should be looking for, put it on their calendars for next week. The first step in keeping your company’s information safe is educating your employees. For example, email phishing scams have increased 667% since the start of the pandemic. We recently shared five ways to verify a phishing email which you can share with your employees as well.
New policies, procedures and plans
In addition to trainings, employees should also learn new IT processes and procedures as an added layer of protection outside of the office. That begins with creating a new work from home security policy. Within that policy, you may add additional IT solutions such as a password manager or mobile device management (MDM) solution. Whatever new processes, policies and procedures you put in place, employees need to know it exists and how to use it.
If you’ve already implemented a new policy, share reminders. Check in with departments to confirm they’re following the new policy and answer any questions. If you haven’t implemented new solutions, take a look at tools and other user-friendly processes that will help encourage employees to continue to practice good cyber hygiene without feeling overwhelmed or frustrated.
Once those two steps are completed, create or update your data breach plan. New cyber threats develop on a daily basis and large companies are ideal targets. Preparing for the worse will help your team enhance its response time, which ultimately
Continuous monitoring
If you’re relying on a standard software to block intrusions, deny access to unauthorized users and share data for review, it’s a great start, but it won’t be enough to stop today’s cyber criminals. They know how to work around blind spots. That’s why continuous monitoring is extremely important, especially while employees are working on their own networks.
Before you start monitoring, you have to know where to look. This is why we work with our clients on performing a cyber baseline evaluation. Learn more about our evaluations in this whiteboard video.
IT modernization
Managing and modernizing legacy infrastructures has always been a challenge for IT teams. With empty offices and server rooms, the team will need to take a closer look at existing IT solutions. Are there ways you can reduce costs and optimize available resources that won’t disrupt operations or increase risks?
Managed Maintenance Services (MMS)
There will also be more time spent on reviewing Operations and Maintenance (O&M) contracts, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) renewals and budgets. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented financial challenges for many companies and as we head into Q4, budgeting will be top of mind for many business executives. The decisions you make this year will dictate your budget for the next five years.
This means now is the time to aggregate all your IT assets into one view. Three Wire clients have access to our ServiceNow-based portal which is FedRAMP compliant. If you already use ServiceNow for IT Service Management and IT Asset Management, our experts can help you with configuration and reporting so that you get a holistic view of not only your assets and their upcoming warranty expiration, but also incident history. With this integrated view, you can see which assets are costing you more money to maintain. This in turn can inform business decisions such as whether to renew a warranty or replace the equipment.
At Three Wire Systems, it has always been our mission to solve problems with technology. Working from home might be here to stay and you don’t want to leave your company’s IT infrastructure in the hands of cyber criminals.
We can help. Our team handles the most sensitive information for Fortune 500 companies and America’s top government agencies including the military branches, Department of Defense and the Department of Education, to name a few. Contact us to learn more.
