May Theme: Securely Access Resources in the Cloud & Office While Working from Home

Teleworking during the Coronavirus outbreak? While working from home can help slow the spread of the virus, it brings new challenges: juggling work while kids are home from school; learning new software and conferencing programs; and managing paper files at home. As you’re getting your work-at-home systems set up, here are some tips for protecting your devices and personal information. 

The trend toward working remotely has been increasing for the past 20 years. The Corona Virus or Covid-19, the emergence of 5G, the transition to the cloud and new technological capabilities for the remote worker has turned the trend parabolic. Over 5 million employees worked exclusively from a home office last year according to Flexjobs.com; a 91% increase over the past 5 years. The Corona Virus has driven that number higher substantially over just the past month. 

The reason remote employees offer cybercriminals such an appealing target is the size of their attack surface. Software vulnerabilities from unpatched software, open RDP ports, and unsecured ports represent 90% or more of all attacks against remote workers. Stunningly, according to last year’s 2019 Global Endpoint Security Trends Report, “42 percent of all endpoints are unprotected at any given time!” 

To add insult to injury, remote employees whose systems are outdated or who don’t have proper security software run the risk of exposing the entire network to the potential for breach if they connect via VPN. 

During the month of May, we will be covering the following: 

Securing home offices using Azure VPNs 
  • Upwards of 7% of the American employee population is working from home. Azure VPN Gateway connects your on-premises networks to Azure through Site-to-Site VPNs in a similar way that you set up and connect to a remote branch office 
  • During this session we will share with how to securely connect those employee home offices to your on-premises resources providing high availability and safe connections from anywhere.
Additionally, we will be touching on the following topics at various degrees of depth: 

Secure your home network 
  • Start with your router. Turn on encryption  
Limit Access to Your Network 
  • Allow only specific devices to access your wireless network. Every device that is able to communicate with a network is assigned a unique Media Access Control (MAC) address.  
Secure Your Router 
  • It’s also important to protect your network from attacks over the internet by keeping your router secure. It’s your first line of defense for guarding against such attacks. If you don't take steps to secure your router, strangers could gain access to sensitive personal or financial information on your device.  
Change your router's pre-set password(s) 
  • Hackers know these default passwords, including any default “user” passwordsso change it to something only you know.  Use long and complex passwords – think at least 12 characters, with a mix of numbers, symbols, and upper and lower case letters. Visit the company’s website to learn how to change the password. 
Log out as Administrator 
  • Once you’ve set up your router, log out as administrator, to lessen the risk that someone can piggyback on your session to gain control of your device. 
Keep your router up-to-date 
  • To be secure and effective, the software that comes with your router needs occasional updates. Before you set up a new router and periodically thereafter, visit the manufacturer’s website to see if there’s a new version of the software available for download. To make sure you hear about the latest version, register your router with the manufacturer and sign up to get updates. 

We hope you will find this very informative, opening new ways to look at the technologies you currently have and new ways to incorporate the solutions tighter into your business structure. As always, we are here to help you integrate these solutions into your operations as our team has done many times. There is no better partner than the one who has lived the adoption cycle. 

George Phipps
Vice President, Strategy

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