A large part of preparing for the current coronavirus crisis is having a plan in the event that most or all of your employees need to stay at home or self-isolate.
This is a great time to draw up a BDR (business disaster recovery) plan to ensure continuity of business or update your existing one. Your BDR should definitely include remote working policies and figuring out what your employees need to do work.
What is a BDR plan? (during and after Coronavirus)
A backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan is a documented technology strategy full of instructions, protocols, and procedures for protecting employees, your organization infrastructure, critical data, and other essential components from a disaster. A great BDR is about recovering from a disaster in order to continue business operations and mitigate losses.
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.
What’s the relevance of the Cloud during and after Coronavirus?
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.
Why is technology security important during (and after) Coronavirus?
Security is always a concern during a crisis because many cyber-criminals come out of the woodwork to exploit businesses during troubled time and when they’re vulnerable.
Yet, there are very simple things businesses can do to counteract any security and cybersecurity issues that will arise during a crisis. Consider things like implementing a VPN for all your staff, along with two factor authentication because enforcing strong passwords 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 during the COVID-19 crisis.
During normal times an email from the company’s senior management asking you to transfer money 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 himself 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.
The Coronavirus crisis (COVID-19) is definitely challenging, but it doesn’t have to be with your IT and technology. We will all get through the Coronavirus situation, together.