Next level stuff and you need to be on board…

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