🔒What part of your pandemic business should you keep?

As your organization scrambled to adjust to COVID-19, you may have implemented temporary solutions that could continue to be of value to the business going forward.

With restrictions lifting, companies can pause to identify any positives that came out of this experience that may lower expenses or boost revenues on a long-term basis.

In doing so, it’s also important to assess if your business may have gotten by with technology practices in the short term that could pose cybersecurity risks if left in place permanently.

Remote work as a business strategy

Many companies that were able to have employees work from home during the pandemic found that not only did work get done, but productivity actually increased.

Now would be an excellent time to review performances and poll employees about their experience working from home while sheltering in place. If you identify individuals who enjoy working from home and excel at it, allowing them to stay remote could free up space in the office.

Some of the cost savings from not having to provide permanent work stations for certain employees can be redirected to improving their home office technology, which may further elevate their job satisfaction and outcomes.

Provide a computer

When U.S. companies began asking workers to start telecommuting en masse, some found it easiest for employees to use their personal PCs or laptops for work.

Many companies didn’t have a choice — all laptop models commonly used for business were out of stock by mid-March.

However, continuing to rely on computers owned by employees poses privacy risks for individual workers and cybersecurity concerns for the company as a whole.

Companies typically provide laptops to remote workers, but there is no reason desktops cannot be provided to individuals whose roles require additional computing power. IT staff or partners can keep these machines patched and up-to-date without physical access.

For workers splitting their work time between the office and home, a practical investment can be providing identical docking ports that easily connect the machine to other hardware, such as a monitor, keyboard, mouse and camera to create the same user experience in both locations.

It’s especially important that laptops commuting with your employees have full-disk encryption in case a device is lost or stolen.

Secure network traffic

Home networks are typically not as hardened from a security perspective as workplace networks. For employees working from home on a long-term basis, the best practice is to segregate the home network with a secure gateway to be utilized only for work.

This is a low-cost hardware investment ensuring that if an employee’s home security camera or smart TV is breached, hackers will not gain access to their work computer. A more extreme option is to provide home internet service for employees that is segregated and secured from day one. This can include a segment of the network for personal use as a perk.

Don’t forget voice communication

Poor phone reception can make it seem like an employee working from home is telecommuting from the moon. It is best not to rely on the cell reception at employees’ homes and to provide hardware that utilizes a quality connection over the internet.

This is typically inexpensive and can take the form of an IP handset, which plugs directly into the network and can be used at home or the office, or a USB or Bluetooth headset in conjunction with software on the work computer.

In addition to call reliability, these technologies can allow remote employees to make calls that appear to come from the office, receive calls at their former in-office phone number, and dial four-digit extensions to reach colleagues.

If employees using their cell phone at home is the most viable option, look into enabling Wi-Fi calling.

Jonathan Stone is chief technology officer of Kelser Corp., an IT consulting firm in Glastonbury.