We are used to managing this type of situation, after all, as a technology company, we have earned a living from getting our clients back up and running when IT does not behave the way you expect it to. Equipment failing is usually met with frustrations of lost work, downtime, and that sick feeling as the disruption to your coming days / weeks starts to sink in. Questions like “What was I working on?”, “Do I have a backup?”, “Is there anything confidential on the machine that I now cannot access?” and perhaps the biggest one, “How long will it take to get fixed?”.

In Paul’s case however, all his work is in the cloud, all his emails are in the cloud. In fact, every part of Paul’s connected world, including his phone, is in the cloud.

The ability to have roaming desktops has been around for years, and in years gone by; if Paul was based permanently in our office, then this process would have still worked. The on-premises servers would have helped to make the process less tedious. Our team would have had Paul back up and running by the end of the day on another machine. Today’s technology, however, no longer requires you to be in the office. In fact, we no longer have a requirement to have servers, in our office. Our line of business application and phone system are cloud based, our email is cloud based and now that our documents are stored in SharePoint, this is also cloud based.

Paul was able to use another machine in the office and simply “sign in”. By signing in, he had access to, well quite simply, everything. Even his recent documents list showed exactly that, his recent docs. His phone app showed that last calls he had made. As he handed over his laptop to Craig, I do recall him being asked one last question, “was there anything on the laptop that he needed?” His answer was a simple “no”.

With the laptop being so new it was under a like for like replacement warranty and to answer the “how long” question, within 1 week, Microsoft had sent him his replacement. All Paul had to do to be back up and running on his machine was – you guessed it, “sign in”.

Welcome to Microsoft’s Modern Workplace.

But what is Shadow IT? And, more importantly, why should you care?

What is Shadow IT?

In its early days, IT was somewhat prescriptive. Users were limited to the functionality presented to them by the software and systems that they used.  The Internet, and more significantly cloud-based SaaS applications such as Dropbox and Salesforce, changed things radically, presenting users with an increasing number of ways to solve their own IT problems.

From file sharing, to line of business applications, users can now self-subscribe to services, often without the approval (or knowledge) of their organisation’s IT team. This growth in unauthorised cloud usage is known as Shadow IT, and it has exploded as a result of the global home working experiment over the last 12 months.

So What? At Least They’re Working

Out of necessity, users have found ways of sharing documents, communicating, and improving their processes; however, in doing so, they have likely trampled on years of established procedures aimed at protecting their organisation’s data, privacy, and intellectual property.  This has placing many organisations firmly in the firing line of organisations such as the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), to name just two.

The End of The Organisational Perimeter

Ultimately, the problem comes down to two things:  the ingress and egress across previously secure organisational boundaries.

Egress is about the unfettered flow of sensitive information to insecure, unmanageable locations.  Think personal email, Dropbox, personal Microsoft 365 OneDrive accounts, memory sticks, etc.  Once your organisation’s sensitive data is ‘out there’, it’s out there forever; regardless of any new policy you might introduce prohibiting it.  You see, the horse has well and truly bolted over the last 12 months, end the problem will only get worse unless you act now.

Ingress is about the loss of control over what can enter your organisation’s cyber perimeter now that many of your employees are working from home, often on shared laptops, using inadequate remote access solutions that were introduced in the dash to home working in 2020.  Ingress is about your organisation’s cyber security footprint; once secure behind central, or branch office, firewalls, and now spanning hundreds of private homes.  These homes are the new battlefront for ransomware, phishing, and social engineering attacks, as users struggle with unfamiliar IT environments, juggle home schooling, and try to find ways to do their job.

5 Steps to Get Control Back

From working with our clients over the years, we’ve amassed a wealth of experience in providing flexible and agile working.  Above all, we’ve learned that you can’t force users to follow the rules, you have to take control back from Shadow IT.  Here’s how:

Offer a Better Experience – The problem with cloud apps today is that they’re, well, really rather good.  To encourage them to use your corporate systems, you need to offer them something that is really, really good.  Microsoft’s Modern Workplace is our answer to this.  It provides a rich cloud-based environment where users can talk, meet, share, collaborate, and access their applications; all from a single Microsoft Teams interface.  You can find out more here.

Re-Establish Your Perimeter – Reduce your perimeter by presenting desktops and applications with Windows Virtual Desktops on Azure, and documents via Teams/SharePoint; bringing your users’ digital workplace back under your control.  You can find out more here.

Apply Compliance Policies – Once you’ve got your data and applications back within your control, you can then apply strict compliance and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies; ensuring that sensitive information does not leave your organisation without your approval.  You can find out more here.

Take Control of Your Endpoints – Laptops are here to stay.  Whether they be corporate or personal devices; deploy appropriate endpoint management to provide Mobile Device Management (for corporate devices), or Mobile Application Management (for personal devices).  You can find out more here.

Educate, Educate, Educate – There’s only so much that technology can do to protect your organisation from cyber threats.  Regular awareness training, coupled with simulated phishing protection, can help to prevent your users from falling foul of cyber criminals.  You can find out more here.

Your cloud strategy is increasingly being dictated by your users’ tactical decisions.  Why not get in touch to hear how WebPorch Solution can help you to make the Cloud ‘strategic’ again.

This is the next generation coming through that are more savvy than most of us in the use of Teams. They might even be able to put a presentation together without the well-known phrase “next slide please”.

I have watched with interest how they use Teams and the first thing to notice is that the educational version looks a little different. Not better or worse than the version we use in business but more geared to the classroom environment.

The debate here is not about the rights and wrongs of home schooling but more about the use of technology to complete the task. Teams is a massive success story in this instance. We might have seen the occasional video blips that poor connections cause, but overall, the calls happen, and the meetings take place.

The tutors and teachers have a register, they can see who is online. They can turn microphones on and off as and when required. They have had to adapt their teaching style to Teams but this is progress.

I don’t know about you but parents evening in the past has been a traumatic event. I am sure it is not much better for the tutors either. Yesterday though, was different.

Normally, your child will book specific slots where the tutors are in a specific room in a building where you have no idea where you are going. When you finally find the right room, bang on time, you find there are 10 people sat on chairs in front of you already waiting to talk.

To be honest, my wife and I did not really know what to expect when having parents evening with Microsoft Teams. For obvious reasons, talking about grades was off the agenda. We had been pre warned (several times) about this. How could they tell us what was going to happen when the Government doesn’t know yet. Other than that, we knew the session would be tutor / teacher led.

So we still had timed slots except that this time, the tutor had to call us. Sure enough, bang on time in all 6 instances, the tutor called to discuss our child’s progress. It was an incredibly slick process and another brilliant use of Microsoft Teams.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones whose children are now at college. This makes them (sort of) self sufficient, in that I don’t have to help them, which is a good thing as they are way cleverer than me and left me behind academically a long time ago. I can empathise with those helping younger ones, and for those on the presenting side, you have had to adapt your teaching style. Having presented many times myself, this is not to be underestimated.

The Microsoft Teams technology though, well this just worked. And worked well.

If you have applied for the bounce back loan in recent months, chances are that you signed the documents digitally using something like DocuSign. These days, paper is very much becoming like my cheque book…somewhat redundant. In fact, writing this made me look at my chequebook (I had to find it first) and the first cheque I wrote was 5 years ago. I still have half of the cheques available in the book. Everything I do with my bank is online.

In fact, I am going through the process of changing banks and everything they have asked me to do has been electronic in some form or other. This is not COVID-19 related, this has been happening anyway. COVID-19 has just fast tracked the process. Such a comprehensive process but no longer carried out in person. Changing banks is another strategic decision I have made. The new bank has pretty much been in contact throughout lockdown. The outgoing bank have not made a single phone call to us highlighting that we made the right decision.

The PayPal thing is yet another sign of the weird, joined-up digital world in which we now live. Again, a dodgy email reminded me that I have not logged into my PayPal account for some time. I just do not use it anymore and I wondered out of curiosity really if there had been any activity on it. I failed at the password hurdle – it has been that long since I logged in that I had forgotten the password. So, after an email or two and a secure password created using my online password manager, I now have a very secure password that I will never forget again. Once logged in however, I was slightly unnerved that PayPal had my up to date credit card details stored as a preferred payment option. This was not just an expired card; this was a card I had reported lost a few months ago in first lockdown so the card company sent me out a new card with new everything on it. How did PayPal get hold of this information? We have always been told that if we have any subscriptions on a card, that we should now update these as they will not be paid. Not it would appear in the case of PayPal however.

Companies House have also jumped on the bandwagon. They have now announced that they are no longer sending out paper reminders. Unless you want reminding, and subscribe to the email service, they are not going to remind you to file anything. The letter even points out that it is the directors’ responsibility to file company’s information on time, so I guess woe betide you if you forget.

I have been wondering why my daughters trampoline club relies on me paying them manually, when they should be collecting the money by direct debit and low and behold, during lockdown, they have implemented a system so that they can control this.

And this is my point, now more than ever, is the time to look at your business processes with a view to automating them. Making strategic decisions about your business to help you streamline processes or automate systems should be high up on your agenda.

This is where we at WebPorch Solution fit in. We are your strategic IT partner. We put our money where our mouths are and invest in our own technology so that our team can be ready to help you invest in yours.

Steve Pickering

So, month 8 in the covid-19 household and it feels a bit like Groundhog Day if I am honest. Home working is most definitely here to stay, leaving us all wondering what the best way is to keep remote employees in the loop of all things company related. When our team are in the office, the level of collaboration is off the scale and when they are at home, the level of productivity goes through the roof. It’s the best of both worlds to be honest, and the challenge is quite simply to find the right balance. As an indication, 75% of the calls into our office are still coming from mobiles, which shows that a high number of you are still also working remotely.

The scramble back in March was to get everyone up and running as quickly as possible. In our IT world, we have seen many acronyms, one of which that has been widely used is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). The March scramble, however, caused us to create a new acronym in the form of GAD (Grab Any Device). We saw huge demand for laptops; in fact, this trend continues globally as distribution centres have lots of stock of desktops but guess what… laptops, being so popular, are not only holding their price, but also proving still to be hard to come by.

BYOD and GAB have, however, brought new challenges. Connecting these devices to your corporate network from home opens up a whole can of worms, security-wise, but allowing any device takes this to another level.

While we have been adjusting to this brave new world, the individuals that are keen to part you from your money have been busier than ever. We have seen a significant increase in attacks and, more worryingly, they are getting very clever. Fortunately, help is on hand. While the criminals have been at work, so have the clever bods. We are now seeing new technologies coming through, clever technology that works in a different way to traditional antivirus products. These new products can detect abnormal behaviour and help to prevent the attack, even if the software doesn’t have a name for whatever is happening on your network.

This is next level stuff, and all companies will eventually be using this. If, like us, you have staff working from home accessing the corporate network on whatever device they could grab then this level of security is not only necessary, but critical. And the good news is, it doesn’t stop there. The boffins that create the firewalls have also been hard at work. At home, your firewall will be built into your router. BT, SKY etc all have this functionality. If you do not have a suitable firewall on your corporate network though, this is no longer good enough. Apart from the fact that they were never designed to have the throughput that all the remote workers are throwing at them, they are also just not secure enough. This is where the next level security in firewalls kicks in.

We live in a world now where technology is advancing at such a pace that it is harder than ever to keep up. That’s where we fit in…

Our layered security solution stack is designed to address the diverse security needs that are today, more than ever, an essential element of your business.

For more information about our layered security stack, click here

Steve Pickering