Three Essential Technologies for Working from Home

Working from home is here to stay, and in this blog, we’ll be addressing three essential technologies for working from home. A large part of preparing for a long term strategy of working from home is having a good plan in place.

You Need a BDR Plan

A Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) plan is your set of instructions, protocols, and procedures for protecting employees, your organization infrastructure, critical data, and other essential components from a disaster. A great BDR plan is about recovering from a disaster in order to continue business operations and mitigate losses.

This is a great time to draw up a BDR plan to ensure continuity of business or update your existing one. Your BDR plan should be expanded to include remote working policies and defining what your employees need to do work in case of disaster.

Your BDR should include all kinds of crisis scenarios and information that can be modified depending on what’s going on, based on the vital parts of your business. It’s becoming more clear this year that remote working should be in every company’s BDR technology roadmap.

And finally, test your plan! We have seen many instances of well planned recovery instructions, but they were un-tested and didn’t work. Test, test, test.

Your Organization’s IT Infrastructure Needs to be Primarily Cloud Based

Over the last few years you may have heard about your peers and other companies say they’re going “into the cloud.”

They might be headed to a cloud-environment for cost or infrastructure reasons, or reasons based on the industry they’re in. On a very general level the cloud is something you can access from anywhere, easily accessing things like your HR software, CRM, and your billing and finance software. The newer cloud-based technologies are usually accessed through a website, whether you’re in the office or at home, allowing your staff to get work done at home.

Businesses need to be thinking about the line-of-business applications they use and work with their IT department to ensure these applications are available when remote. They also should be considering ways to integrate these apps from traditional on-premise environments to the cloud. The last thing your organization wants to have happen is to be caught flat-footed when a crisis occurs.

You Need a Security Plan

Security is always a concern because many cyber-criminals are always looking to exploit businesses who have a weak security plan.

There are very simple things businesses can do to counteract any security and cybersecurity issues that will arise. Consider things like implementing a VPN for all your staff, along with two factor authentication because enforcing strong password policies will ensure a less likely occurrence of security issues.

One item that should be at the top of your technology security discussions is how to prevent advanced phishing attempts. These types of social engineering attacks have grown as more organizations move to work from home models.

In the past, when an email from the company’s senior management was asking you to transfer money, it would raise a few red flags and it would only take a few minutes to call IT, the person sitting next to you or the manager themselves to confirm face to face. To mitigate this you should have consistent staff training and teach them to be suspicious, especially when they’re working from home.

These are three essential technologies for working from home and if you need assistance with any of them, our IT services and work from home experts are here to help.