Cappuccino Chat - Episode 13 - Working From Home

welcome back to another episode of cappuccino chat this time we're going to discuss working from home okay this time we're talking about working remotely from home for either you and/or your employees because there's a number of items we do have to go over I am gonna cheat today and kind of look down once well so you're gonna see me look down so a couple of things we need to cover to make sure we address before just sending everybody home we're trying to work remotely first off is what do you need access to so what do I mean by that so are you just looking for simple you know email access so you do need file and folder do you need applications like QuickBooks or maybe your core application that you use that's database driven at the office are you going to need access to printers and things of that nature remotely so we need to uncover these answers before we can make a determination of the best way to move forward and best solution because we can go a couple different directions with this so after we've decided that then we need to know do you need access to the office phones so I don't mean just forwarding to someone's cell phones I mean do you need the phones to still ring like they normally would maybe follow some kind of call flow you know like where it calls into your reception then from there if they don't answer it go somewhere else those kinds of things we need to decide if that functionality is still needed in this time and or do they need full access to the full system remotely to keep those things running right so or it can be just simply forward to cell phones and that will be okay so once we make that determination again we may have to make changes to your phone systems not all phone systems are the same if you're using a true voice-over-ip cloud-based solution it should be pretty easy to maintain that you pretty much can just take your phone home and have your users plug it straight into their internet connection and they should be able to make phone calls and have their call flow ring just like before most people don't have that so that's where we get where we have to have some conversations to figure some things out now after that the third thing we need to talk about is can your firewall and your internet connection even handle the additional load and/or the requirements to let you work securely from home so what I mean by that is a lot of the internet connections even now and so far have sorted a tumble and fumble and have some issues at certain times of the day where it seems like it's lagging our infrastructure isn't built to have this much load and this many people at home on the internet doing as much as they are doing now their kids are now home streaming Netflix more often you know your Apple TVs and such so one can your business internet connection handle it and two can your employees or your internet connection at home handle the additional load next is your firewall so not all firewalls are built the same a home router or whatever you might have doesn't have that secure piece built into it what I mean by that is the VPN functionality so we want to make sure we don't just allow anything through to allow remote access through your firewall because the still the number one threat to attack computers and networks right now is still through that remote access port when it's left open so we want to make sure we keep that closed and put that extra layer of VPN on there so we need to determine if your firewall has that DPN capabilities built into it now number four is what device are you gonna be connecting from so is it a business issued device like a laptop or tablet or is it a personal device maybe a laptop or a desktop at their home so if it's a business device hopefully you've got your business antivirus and other security and things locked down tight so that when they're home it's got the same security framework in place that you don't have to worry about them doing something that they shouldn't be doing or accidentally do while they're at home if it's a personal device though a lot of computers that you buy at home and get set up that come into our office after having some problems we find it's they thought they had antivirus but that free one that they got from Best Buy or Costco or Sam's Club it expired a year ago hasn't been updating they never put their credit card in it Microsoft updates or the Apple updates even Mac users still have to update the OS to keep it secure just isn't being done so we need to be very careful in allowing personal devices access to your corporate network the way the VPN and remote technologies work is it's typically a two-way communication that means if there's something on the laptop that's infected piece of malware anything like that it can actually crawl back through the tunnel and get back to your business network and then cause issues back there at the office and we don't want that right now after that now we know what device we're coming from but what device are they connecting to so a lot of businesses don't have terminal servers which is a server that's dedicated to allowing remote access to it so we could have you know 15 20 30 people connecting into a server without any problems but a lot most businesses don't have that already setup if you do that's great have everybody come into the terminal server they log in just like normal and we're good after they connect to that VPN of course now for everybody else they'll have to have their work PC left on once their work PC is left on then we can have it set up so that they would just after they VPN in then they would remote into their work PC this is gonna be the easiest form they're already familiar with it you know everyone's a little stressed out right now so the last thing we need is a lot of change to things but they're already familiar with how their desktop looks where all the program icons are at how to find things so this would just be the easiest one to do is just remote directly back into their desktop so that's what we want to set up but again those computers need to be left on and if they happen to have a laptop at work and then that's the laptop they want to take home well now we've got no device for them to log into so you can see why this is an important step in all of this next thing is six is the of course setting up the VPN and the Remote Desktop Protocol so the VPN again we want to make sure your firewall is capable of doing that and then remoting in remote desktop there's some configuration that has to be done on the desktop now if the device there remoting in from is a Mac or an Apple device of some kind they do make a remote desktop client for the Mac but again that will need to be downloaded and configured as well another thing we need to talk about yet is those printers so hopefully you don't need to print at home but if you do there's going to be some special configurations that we need to make sure get done or that you have done to that to allow for remote printing to a home-based computer printer so it's not as easy as you would think it would be there's some caveats to setting that up so we'd want to definitely address that to make sure we get that get that going next number seven so this is something I always say is the best bang for the buck whenever dealing with security and it's even more important now with everybody wanting more and more information about what's going on where the latest attacks happening and the infections what's going on what can I do with this and that is end-user security training so we don't want them using these devices that they're remoting back into your business with just clicking anywhere in doing anything there's a lot of bad actors out there right now that are stepping up their game setting up fake websites sending email links that look like they're going to legitimate news sites to get the latest coronavirus map and things of that nature that are actually doing that to gather information from you so we want to don't want to necessarily have people slacking off we don't want to scare them anymore if you will but we want to make sure they stay on top of that and we're educating our clients and all of our employees connecting back in don't just click on anything we recently had a client call in they received an invoice from someone that they've been working with for years upon years they clicked on the link it prompted for a username and password they thought it was funny funny that it was there being prompted for it they didn't they didn't understand why they might be but they needed to get things going for this particular vendor that they were working with so they went ahead and entered their credentials so I'm sure you already know the end of the story yes they were breached they had some issues we had to secure that up for them after the fact so please please make sure you constantly communicate with your employees if working from home remind them hey this is a work device at this point even if you think you are letting them use their personal device have them use their cell phones for you know clicking on emails or keeping up on the news and coronavirus stuff that way it's not gonna get back to your network during these times the next and last thing number eight is if you're working with an IT person or you're just doing it yourself make sure that those PCs laptops whether they be business or personal that get taken home please please please make sure that the updates are being done on them that you've got good strong antivirus and the antivirus is being updated on a normal schedule like it's supposed to be the best thing to do is if you are working with an IT company such as us is have those temporarily added to your contract that way we can help your employees while they're working from home so all we need is them connected to the Internet we'll be able to remote in see what's going on they're having any problems if things change and they do want to print from home at home and originally we didn't think the need would be there again we'll be able to remote in without having to go on site in these times and do those types of things so when they have problems connecting we'll be able to see their computer at their home as well so that would be my last and final thing again if you have any questions concerning this whether you're working with us or someone else please give us a call our phone number seven six zero seven seven zero five two zero zero you