The forced entry into remote working has torn holes in security and introduced new vulnerabilities.
Most organisations in South Africa were forced into remote working during the pandemic. They had little choice – either get online or shut down. However, despite a variety of choices in tech and solutions, for many, the undertaking was a lot more complicated than it first appeared, particularly for small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Why? Because suddenly a single branch business has become a multi-branch operation (each staff member’s home becoming a virtual branch extension), that brings with it many of the same challenges and risks of large multi-branch organisations.
With multiple employees working from multiple environments, the business now has multiple branch offices sitting in homes across the country. These branches all need the right technology in order to operate efficiently and empower their people properly. Fortunately, there are technologies that offer these businesses the right tools to manage people, process and productivity from any location, anywhere.
The first step is to focus on security. There are major security challenges introduced by remote working that must be considered – both when employees are remote and working from home. The vulnerability of an employee’s PC is just one of the many security risks that come with working from home and often the tools that are deployed in the office are left behind when people take their devices home. When users access the internet from home, they can place both themselves and the company in a vulnerable position. Using the right tools, businesses can monitor their own data and monitor when it’s accessed, who’s accessing it, and what has been done to the data.
This layer of visibility is essential as it hands control back to the business and ensures that the data is safe and compliant with increasingly stringent regulations. Compliance measures are vitally important today and can be managed with software that allows for secure data storage, secure device management, automated backups and comprehensive data recall. These cloud solutions are intelligent and come with tools that provide insights, reporting and detail that can be used to fully manage data and its usage.
Turrito provides ICT solutions that are designed to aggregate the best IT and telecommunications products for the mid-market and corporate business in South Africa. The company designs solutions that pull together all the threads of the best technology in the market and weave these solutions into your business to get the best results. It’s not about one size fits all, the greatest lie in technology and clothing history, but about proactive customisation of solutions that address the unique remote working and security requirements of your organisation.
With this level of customisation, companies can rapidly deploy the virtual office from multiple locations without running the risk of unplanned vulnerabilities, and while still achieving the goals of productivity and capability. This also allows organisations to continue work from home practices in the future, empowering their people to work in ways that suit their needs while achieving significant growth and flexibility. The future has changed, now is the time to invest in the technology that enables that change.
