Dust is settling, its time to re-visit the WFH IT Setup

Over the past couple of months, the world has seemingly been turned upside down, by an invisible killer. Businesses have been forced to close their premises, employees have been forced to work from home.

For the first few weeks of lock down, there was a flurry of organisations trying to figure out how they would make it work. Many businesses have never had their employees working from home before, and had to re-evaluate a lot of their IT systems in a very short space of time.

A very popular route of allowing remote working, is to install a VPN. A VPN allows employees to connect to their office network, therefore giving them access to internal resources, that may not be accessible over the internet. For example a file share, or an Intranet, for some, there may be internal tools which need to be protected, so they are kept internally.

Whilst hopefully nearly all businesses are now setup, and working. There is definitely a strong need to now revisit some of these systems which have been rushed into place. We have all heard of Corona-virus threats, hacking attacks and phishing scams to name but a few. There are people on the internet, who want to harm your business – not because its your business – but because they stand to make a profit.

The best way to get rid of a VPN service, is to make your tools publicly accessible – but wait! They need to be secure first!

Some internally developed tools, or file sharing servers may not be suitable for putting on the internet. We find within 10 minutes of putting some servers online, they are already under attack. This means that companies really need to evaluate how save their servers and applications are. Applications which are not inherently safe, are only made partially safe by putting them behind a VPN. Those unsafe applications are still on the network, still ready to be attacked if someone could simply get the office Wi-Fi code, or plug in an ethernet cable – or even use an infected computer.

Simply put, VPN works great, but can often be used more as a plaster (or band aid as friends across the pond call it). The real solution is to use more secure services in the first place, meaning they can be put online, negating the need, in many cases for a VPN. Don’t get us wrong – we love VPNs, but they need to be used for the right reasons, as well as used securely.

But how do we move onto more secure systems?!?

This is where Office 21 can help. Using our security expertise, combined with our knowledge of how users like to work, we can develop and implement strategies to help your organisation move into the cloud era. Whatever your business’s needs are, Office 21 can guarantee zero downtime cloud migration, for any service. Exchange, File Sharing, Internally built tools, Video Conferencing, VoIP telephone systems, Antivirus systems, Web servers, intranets – all systems we can host in our own data-centre based in London, or anywhere in the globe using AWS/Azure services. It all starts with the audit.