A number of developments over recent months, highlighted how the company can be suddenly and unexpectedly, without the services of key employees, possibly for long periods of time. For example, advertising in 2009 to the anticipated pandemic flu showed that the government’s response to such situations will escalate to close the school. This will leave a large number of parents can not attend their normal place of work.
It is very important to prepare the company for these events, to assess the risk to operations if key personnel are unable to reach their places of duty. However, after the risks understood, it is quite possible to select and deploy a range of technical solutions to mitigate these risks.
1. Equip your key employees to work outside the premises – many of your key employees may already be equipped with laptops and smartphones to fulfill their day to day duties. They must obtain additional equipment? 3G modems or keys? It would be reasonable to provide more key employees with laptops and smart phones?
2. Make sure that key employees to working from home – as well as providing the necessary equipment, you must be sure that the home have adequate facilities. Britain offers the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development gives advice on how to help employees set up to work from home and how to manage their remote contributions.
3. Ensure that key staff have access to audio / video conferencing and online meeting rooms – Access to the audio conference bridge is easy to install. You can relay details of the bridge via a mobile phone or email as needed. If employees must use this facility with customers or partners, they will have at his own expense a bridge with your supplier. There are a number of online meeting systems such as Microsoft LiveMeeting, Citrix GoToMeeting or Cisco WebEx. Many organizations, the ban on the use of Skype in corporate networks, but also in emergency situations, it is easy to use, and many people already have access from their home PCs.
4. Review your access control for personal devices – organizations are understandably reluctant to employees using personal devices (PCs, smart phones) to access the corporate network. But, in an emergency situation, this may be the only way to restore the key employees who can not get into the office. Consider whether you can pre-approve home computers for a number of key individuals (Do they have modern anti-virus/spyware? Is Windows Update turned on?) And relax the network access control to be used in emergency situations
5. Decide how you will cope with the additional connections via VPN gateways and firewalls – the likelihood that your plans will mean a significant increase in the number of employees access the corporate network from outside. It is advisable to negotiate with suppliers of your perimeter security solutions in advance to decide how any short-term licenses “overdraft” can be processed.
6. Make sure that the deputies can access all the data necessary in the absence of key staff – this is a procedural question, to provide increased access privileges to those members who will act in the absence of key employees. Procedures for requesting and approval of elevated privileges, but to “break the glass” access to the rapidly developing state of emergency can be integrated into your identity and access management systems.
7. Think about how you can agree to cooperate on key information project – you can organize your information in Microsoft OneNote and synchronization between your PC and office laptop, with cheap (or free) cloud services. More recent developments allow synchronization of laptops with the iPhone or iPad, using a cloud-based or Wi-Fi services. In corporate environments, collaboration using OneNote notebooks can be controlled by (more ubiquitous) Sharepoint Portal. Using a combination like this, the key information needed for critical activities are distributed among all members of your team and be available almost everywhere, where they are. At the moment decision for the iPhone is limited to read-only, but that the change in laptops using the iPhone is poised for public testing the beta version.
Just a thought – like all plans, you should check their agreement. There must be things that you’ve forgotten, and you will only find out that they, when you do it. Famous Online Tech News Site Silicon.Com organizes periodic “work at home” days, when all Editorial stay away from the office, and they try to start the day as usual. This is a great way to learn what works and what needs tweaking.
Tom Mellor is the owner and principal consultant of Portsmouth, UK-based enterprise security consulting Identigrate UK. Volume career in IT includes more than 30 years, covering the infrastructure management and service management, as well as Enterpise security. For over 10 years, Tom has led global programs in Identity and Access Management, Security Event Management and Cyber Security.
