Bengaluru, Karnataka, India | 9th April 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns around the world has pushed businesses into the biggest remote working experiment of our age. The challenges of remote working are impacting all kinds of organisations albeit at different levels. With almost 100% of the white-collar workforce working from home, organisations are faced with prioritising business continuity as well as securing their data and systems at the same time. The IET’s Cybersecurity working group has put together some best practices to be followed at this crucial time to safeguard employees and as well as organisations that are navigating through the new order of remote working.
This advisory note is part of a series brought out by the expert volunteer panel members comprising of solutions to problems that will have a significant impact on the world in the years to come.
Expert authors of the advisory suggest a host of preventive measures at an organisation level including identifying critical business applications, robust and frequent communications between the IT and leadership/senior management team, re-looking at cloud platform dependencies and associated choice of providers, building layered access controls, frequent software updates and enhanced threat intelligence efforts and rapid development and deployment of security patches.
The authors also offer tips to individual employees to do their bit to secure their enterprise data. Simple steps like being cautious about the sites we visit while on the enterprise network, following the IT team’s instructions to the T, scheduling periodic data back up and changing the home WiFi password periodically are useful.
The advisory note has been authored by Anand Handa, Project Executive Officer, Interdisciplinary Centre for Cyber Security and Cyber Defence of Critical Infrastructures, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and Arnab Chattopadhyay, Associate Director, IBM as well as Arvind Tiwary, Chairperson – IET Cyber Security Working Group Chair, TiE IoT Forum.
The IET India Advisory notes along with a host of other whitepapers and reports are available for download on our website.
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