Get and Keep your Work From Home Office Running

So you’ve all started working from home. This recent mass transition to work from home has proven to be incredibly difficult on companies not previously equipped. What needs to be considered?

Connectivity

• Ensure you have access to resources you need
  • On-prem resource: Many resources in a small business reside on individuals personal computers. And often these are individuals desktops. Now in a huge sprint to work from home people certainly are not going to be trucking their desktops home with them. Nor are customers going to each be able to bring the Quickbooks server home with them. So how do you get access to the files that were on your desktop or a local server from home?
    • First VPN back into the office. This can be done using existing infrastructure (like firewalls) or purchasing a VPN Tap to allow VPN access in. VPNs are imperative over RDPing to ensure security to the existing office. Learn how to VPN into an Uplevel gateway here….
    • Then navigate around to necessary resources. This can be printers, servers, desktops, anything on the network. Once a secure connection is established you can use a number of access tools including the built in Microsoft Remote Desktop, or Remote access on a Mac. There are also third party tools like Teamviewer that can also be used to see a desktops screen.
    • Once connected into the network and able to view onsite resources employees, regardless of their location, can all access data and resources just like they were there.
  • Cloud Based Resources: This has certainly been a great time to utilize existing cloud based solutions. Cloud based infrastructure, including VoIP phones can easily be moved (on a general case, but specifics depend on the phone vendor) to any location. This means employees can take their phones home, plug it in and be up and running like normal.
• Stabilize your connections to the internet. Home internet access certainly is not known for its stability and reliability. During this coronavirus outbreak we are seeing a huge strain on an already unstable home internet connection. And as everyone is working from home, customers cloud based solutions, and VPN connections back to the office, are only as good as the ISP links they are run over.
  • Internet Failover: Adding in an LTE link to failover to when the primary goes out ensures that employees can continue to work during internet ups and downs. This also ensures that when working on cloud based software, an internet connection mid project, does not loose any existing data. Get more information on how this severely impacted a grocery store in Hawaii here…
  • Aggregating links together: Combining two links together allows customers to use two ISP lines at once. This means if you have two 10Mbps links, you can add them together and, effectively, have a 20Mbps line into the office or house. This can be through different providers to ensure an outage on one ISP line does not bring the entire office to a halt.

Security

• Secure the main office
  • Ensure that to give access to the main office remotely does not additionally open up the office to hackers. This means:
    • Closing all inbound ports. Most importantly RDP ports. Though RDP is a great way to get access into the network remotely, opening the ports up to the entire internet is a HUGE security hole. Many hackers will continuously probe RDP ports to find any vulnerabilities and gain access into the network. The same solution can be created using VPN connections with secure solutions and then remote desktop-ing on top of this.
    • Using secure solutions to gain access back into the network. The largest importance here is knowing that security is inherently built into the products. But, this can also be blocking access via IP address, ensuring a form of multi factor is used, etc.
• Secure the home office
  • Home offices, now more than ever, need to have some sort of security. With employees now accessing accounting materials, critical customer data, and all other company data. Keep in mind, this is on the same network that may have old, unpatched and vulnerable, devices. The same network that is secured by the ISP modem, which, is not known for security. If you would not want your next door neighbor being able to see your financials then why would you also want the entire internet to see it? This is what could happen with insecure networks. The easily fix for this is a basic form of security. The Uplevel gateway allows home offices to get up and running quickly without extensive configuration.
• Segregate out home traffic from office traffic
  • Working from home can often mean the payroll information, or critical customer data is on the same network as the Netflix or video game streams. Even if this is done on a different device this traffic can allow hackers in and allow them to propagate attacks around to other devices. Segregating out these devices onto different networks can often mean saving a machine from also being infected.

Deploy with Ease

• With the mass migration home it is imperative that solutions allowing work from home environments are easy to deploy. Just because you are working from home does not necessarily mean you also want to rework your entire home infrastructure or become a security expert. But it is VERY important that security is in the forefront of everyones mind. Because well, hackers – they’ve always worked from home!
• The Uplevel gateway is an easy plug-and-play with configurations that can be made from anywhere using the cloud controller. Simply drop ship it to customers, as an MSP, or direct mail it to your home. You can even configure the gateway while it is offline.

But most importantly, think about the future. As everything is rapidly changing at the moment it is critical the companies, whether at home or on site, are thinking about how they too will have to permanently pivot moving forward.