COVID-19: Cyber Defense and Resilience during remote operations

The business world is in a defensive huddle to take on nature’s version of zero-day malware in the form of COVID-19. The pandemic has brought many businesses to a halt. The effects of social distancing and travel restrictions are having an unprecedented impact on the operating model of organizations and forcing a severe disruption to the workplace.

The key operational result due to the need for social distancing is the need to rapidly implement Work From Home (WFH) models for their employees as governments of the world are forced to enforce lockdowns in the interest of public health and safety.

WFH: a paradigm shift in the way the businesses will operate

WFH enablement by the CIO’s and CTO’s is a strong response to encourage social isolation and to win the war against community spread of COVID-19. Some aspects that CIO’s and CTO’s need to be cognizant while implementing and sustaining WFH include:

• Building computing resilience: availability of endpoint devices to employees for WFH or enabling mobile-based access to critical devices.
• Remote access is the order of the day: sufficiency of licenses for technologies like VPN clients, virtualization systems, and cloud-enabled applications.
• Outage proofing infrastructure: ensure vendor support to service on-site hardware in case of outages.
• Disruption free transacting: Access to systems on a need to do basis: the key for businesses to remain disruption-free, is to ensure that business teams are.