It seems likely that some of the changes COVID-19 forced on us have been popular enough to become business as usual – especially a shift toward long-term and even permanent work-from-home policies. But if your organization doesn’t plan to return to the office for many months to come (or at all), you’ve got cybersecurity challenges you didn’t have in pre-pandemic times. And that means you need to give some serious thought to these five questions:
- How will you let employees continue accessing business-critical applications securely from home? You could block remote access and find a different way of doing the work, but that would slam the brakes on productivity. A virtual private network (VPN) or virtual desktop solution might be more practical.
- How will you secure public-facing logins? There are lots of options for keeping unauthorized users from accessing your SaaS solutions, such as multi-factor authentication, a consolidated login page, or CAPTCHAs, and you can use more than one.
- How will you enable vendor access? IT maintenance needs to continue whether or not your office is open, so you need a secure approach to granting, managing, and monitoring third-party access to your IT infrastructure.
- How will you manage access during furloughs and layoffs? You need tools and processes for revoking access credentials in bulk – and also for restoring them quickly for the employees you bring back.
- How will you manage an eventual transition back to the office? You’ll want to ensure enough support to handle everyone’s requests for help with forgotten and expired passwords. In addition, consider reviewing your access rights to make sure they reflect how people’s roles and responsibilities have shifted since they were last at their desks.
Xantrion can help you answer all these questions – or we can take over managing your IT infrastructure and save you the trouble. Contact us to start planning a future workplace that works for you.
