With the Corona Virus moving from an Epidemic to Pandemic state, awareness, panic and late reactions have set in and the most viable form of containment seems to be reduction of social interactions aka self quarantine. However extended quarantine brings in its own set of challenges such as: food, social issues, psychological technology, etc.
This is also the time when a lot of people are going to be working from home and some of them might be working on systems not made to be used on the WAN in terms of efficiency or security. This is a juicy lip smacking time for the big bad wolves out there :)
While there are a lot of articles on how to handle the other quarantine issues, I wanted to put up a list that organisations and its people can use to get their technology and networks in place to enable smoother and more secure WFH activities.
1. VPN - Select a good VPN system. This will ensure you are securely connected to your dedicated resources back at the office or your Cloud VPC. A good choice of open source / commercial and effective technologies are OpenVPN / Zerotier / Wireguard / Hemachi. If this quarantine phase is going to go the distance it will be wise on your part to seek out the lightest bandwidth usage protocol you can find. A lot of people working from home is going the stretch the limits of bandwidth on the ISPs
2. RDS / Connection Brokers / NX : For organisations using locked down IP restrictions or desktop based applications, a good choice of Remote Desktop technology to log into systems back in the office or cloud still pay dividends on the mid run.
3. MFA - Working from home means ramping up your security, add a Multi-factor Authentication and choose the VPN and RDS systems appropriately. Google and Microsoft have Openid Identification platforms. There are other contender such as jumpcloud etc
4. Groupware / Collaboration software : A good Collaboration Suite such as Slack / Teams / Hangouts / Zoom / Skype will help you keep your teams in touch and motivated.
5. Sanitised and Secure Laptops : Make sure users Laptops have the right license, software and an Internet Security suite plus a Data Leak Prevention System.
6. WiFi upgrade : Time for users to upgrade the WiFi systems at home, most of the time the Internet Services Provider will provision users with a mediocre wifi equipment. Now that you are going to be dependent on it, rampup your WiFi equipment with reliable stuff.
7. Internet Rampup and Redundancy : Talk to your ISP and figure out if you need to change your data plans and put in a bigger pipe with more download limit per month. Ensure you have decent upload limits as well as you will be sending serious size of data out.
8. Good Headset / Camera / Bigger Monitor- HD: A good quality headset, HD camera if you need one to augment your laptop cam, a Bigger monitor if you need it, possibly with HD.
9. Ergonomic chair : Get an ergonomic chair. You are going to spend a lot of time on it.
This should set your organisation and their people up on a stable platform for Work From Home.
Any insights into problems you have faced and any tips you might have, glad to have your comments !!
Have a Healthy Diet, Exercise Daily, Practice Hygiene and stay Safe all !!
June 22,2019
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