https://www.impresscomputers.com/why-work-with-us/
Sherman: Welcome back to Biz Talk with Sherman. I’m your host Sherman on from Hotelling Insurance Services. Next segment we’re talking about here, Roland Parker, your tech your biz. Welcome back to the show, Roland.
: Hey, Sherman. Nice to be back again.
Sherman: All right. Now, this is very timely. I was just talking to this about a team, about cybersecurity. So we know this is super important topic of to be able to go over. But how can businesses get ready to ensure that their employees can work safely from home?
Roland Parker: Well, the first thing is to do is make sure that they have a company issue computer that’s completely locked down. That’s the only way that you can know that they’re going to be safe when they work from home. The last thing you want to do is have an employee using their own computers because that way you’ve got no eyes on it and you’ve got no control.
Sherman: Now, is it is it possible for I think this kind of gets into a little bit of that privacy, right? Can they monitor the employees from their laptop, from when they’re working from home?
Roland Parker: You have to have special software to be able to monitor it. And there’s lots of solutions that are out there. Personally, I’m not a big fan of that. I feel, you know, with the employees at home or in the office, are they productive? Are they doing what they can do? Now, if you want to take it to the level of I want to see everything that’s going on, that’s fine. But personally, I think just lock the machine down, make sure that it can’t nothing can be downloaded or installed and then make it safe. But you don’t have to monitor them, you know, if they want to work at 2:00 in the morning and not 2:00 pm during the day, that’s fine as long as they get the work done.
Sherman: So I think it’s a crucial element to have a look at, especially as we kind of enter this new world of how we’re working, right?
Roland Parker: Absolutely.
Sherman: So one of the concerns might be, okay, I’m using my personal laptop and I’m now jumping on to the company VPN, if you will. Where’s the concern of that?
Roland Parker: Well, it’s just something that in today’s age shouldn’t happen. We had an exact case of this happen last week. The bookkeeper for a company actually said, well, we’re going to take we’re going to let the bookkeeper work from home because she was not feeling well. And they allowed her to access the computers with her home machine. It was a Windows 7 out of date machine that his son used to play games on. And guess what? She got infected. She jumped on the server. She infected the entire company. We had to shut everybody down, recover from the backups, restore them. Don’t do it. This is bad news. You cannot allow employees to use their home computer if you need to have a roving computer, have one that’s locked down. Okay. You’re working from home today. Give them a company issued lock down machine. Nothing else is going to protect you.
Sherman: Now, what about the people that would say, well, what’s happening, Roland, is we’re all just jumping onto the cloud, right? Office 360. There’s no downloading. What would your response be to that for the person that’s, quote unquote, in the cloud?
Roland Parker: It’s the exact same thing. You’re still attaching to company information and you can still infect your cloud environment by allowing an infected machine to access to anywhere on your network, whether it’s in cloud or on prem server.
Sherman: Now, unfortunately, we have to go down this kind of you might have a disgruntled employee, right? Not everybody works out well. How can you protect yourself and the business from a from a disgruntled employee?
Roland Parker: Well, we use a program called Threat Locker and Threat Locker says, okay, no malicious software can be installed, but you can lock it down further to say, we can’t copy information so people can’t remove information. Your confidential information. Now, as far as them corrupting information or maliciously deleting stuff, that’s when you’ve got to have a good backup. If for some reason they go in there and start deleting folders or files, what you really want to do is say, cut them off, restore from your backup and nothing’s lost.
Sherman: So man, we have to worry about much different things than just being egged on the way out by a disgruntled employee. We’ve got to think about, hey, how can they really affect the way that we do business and locking things up or, heaven forbid, putting in some kind of weird ransomware.
Roland Parker: Sure. So, you know, having those protections in place. And then, you know, when you do get to the point where they are leaving, you do really want to cut off the access. As we discussed last week with the Colonial Pipeline, we’re not even sure if it was a disgruntled employee. It was just an ex employee that the credentials were compromised and the IT department had not cut off the access. So when when an employee leaves, cut off the access, change all the passwords.
Sherman: Super sound advice. So I know people are listening to this. So much of what we do now is. Digital. If they don’t have a good plan, how can they reach out to you? Roland and and your team?
Roland Parker: Sure. The easiest thing to do is give us a call to 2816479977 or reach us on the web. Empress computers. That’s Imp says computers dot tech tech.
Sherman: Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for coming in on the show, Roland, and just sharing with us how people can really start protecting themselves about employees that are working from home. We’re going to take a quick commercial break and come back with Colleen. It’s your business. Let’s get started.