Coleman Technologies Blog

How to Minimize General Exposure in the Office

Based on what is currently known about the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have some recommendations as to how to keep the potential impact of coronavirus to a minimum:

• Encourage employees who are ill to stay home. This will help to minimize the spread of infection within your business. Make sure that your employees are aware of this policy by reiterating it verbally, and by posting notices around the office encouraging them to stay home if under the weather.
  
  Emphasize hygiene and etiquette. Properly stifling coughs and sneezes and keeping hands clean are surprisingly effective ways to keep your workplace healthier. Rather than using their hands to catch a cough or sneeze, your employees should use a tissue or--if unable to do so--use the upper part of their sleeve.
  
  The CDC recommends that tissues and alcohol-based hand sanitizer should be made readily available. Make sure your employees are washing their hands with soap and water for the recommended 20 seconds.
  
  

• Engage in keeping the workplace clean. There is a chance that coronavirus (and other illnesses) could be spread via infected surfaces. Make sure that all surfaces that are touched frequently, like desks, workstations, and doorknobs, are kept sanitized. Provide your employees with disposable wipes so they can proactively disinfect these surfaces before use.

If you find that one of your employees is confirmed to have been infected with coronavirus, make sure that you inform their coworkers of their possible exposure while still maintaining the confidentiality that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires. These employees and those who are living with a sick family member should assess their risk of exposure using the CDC’s guidelines.

Coronavirus as a Cyberthreat

Unfortunately, coronavirus will also require you to also keep an eye on your network security, particularly if you operate within the healthcare industry. Hackers and cybercriminals have taken advantage of the widespread concern that the disease has caused. For example:

• Scammers have phished healthcare providers with updates that appear to have come from the World Health Organization or hospitals local to their area, but actually introduce keyloggers into their systems.
• Those involved in the medical supply chain have been targeted with emails referencing the coronavirus that install malware to steal information.
• Ransomware has been introduced into consumer systems by promising recipients of an email information about COVID-19’s spread.

While the current climate may not make it easy, these emails and other threat vectors can be overcome through the same best practices that foil other cyberthreats. In addition to comprehensive digital protections, training your employees to spot these threats will be crucial.

Of course, you should also maintain a comprehensive backup in case you need to recover from a successful attack.

How to Maintain Productivity with Your Team at Home

With today’s technology, sending an employee home sick doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be sacrificing that employee’s productivity. We now have many ways that your team can work effectively from home, still contributing to your organizational agenda without exposing their coworkers to their illness.

Equipping Your Employees

Remote access solutions, paired with virtual private networking technology, can allow your employees to securely continue their work from home, safely accessing the applications and data their tasks require through an encrypted connection. As collaboration will certainly be necessary, you will want to be sure that your employees are also equipped with the communication tools that facilitate this collaboration as well.

Network Protections

You will also want to thoroughly secure your network infrastructure to help prevent threats like phishing attacks and other methods from being successful… as well as preparing for a potential breach or emergency with data backups and disaster recovery policies and procedures (including contact information for your employees) to help mitigate a worst-case scenario.

Employee Awareness

Finally, make sure your employees are on the lookout for any suspicious activity that could be a cybercriminal’s attempt at using the coronavirus as a means to an end. Not only should your employees know how to spot these attempts; they should also know the proper procedures for reporting and handling them.

Is the coronavirus scary? At this point, it is safe to say that it is, but does it have to interrupt your business operations entirely? Not if you are properly prepared.

For more assistance in preparing your business for any kind of disaster, reach out to the professionals at Coleman Technologies by calling (604) 513-9428.

What is COVID-19?

COVID-19, better known as coronavirus, is a respiratory illness that first appeared in Wuhan, China, and was reported in the United States on January 21st, 2020.

As of March 3rd, 12 states have reported 60 total cases of coronavirus and six confirmed deaths, with no vaccines or specific antiviral treatments for the illness. Symptoms of the virus include fever, shortness of breath, and a cough, while those with complications from the virus can experience pneumonia in both lungs, failure of multiple organs, and death. 

Downtime is Crushing

Any time your organization isn’t operating under normal circumstances (i.e. any time it’s simply not functioning, or functioning at a loss) can be considered downtime. This takes multiple forms, including employees unable to access critical software or data, the office being shut down due to a power outage, or even technology problems that result in devices not working as intended. Whatever the reason--and data loss disasters are a big one--you can bet that downtime has a considerable impact on both your wallet and your organization’s long-term sustainability.

Data Loss is Challenging

What a lot of businesses might not understand about data loss is that it equates to lost progress, or work that needs to be done over again. Think about it this way; your organization has to collect all the data again, assuming that there is no way to actually restore it. This is why so many businesses have a data backup and disaster recovery solution, as retracing your steps can be costly, time-consuming, and, quite frankly, a waste of time that could have been avoided with the proper foresight.

Considerable Fines for Security Risks

In many cases, a data disaster can involve a security breach, where personally identifiable information or sensitive corporate data can be stolen or exposed to danger. When this happens, certain industries that are supposed to adhere to various security thresholds may be subject to fines based on the specific types of data affected. It’s needless to say that this kind of disregard for security compliance can lead to crippling fines and legal repercussions.

In all of the above cases, having a data backup and disaster recovery solution from Coleman Technologies can offset the challenges and difficulties of operating at a loss. To learn more about the solutions we offer, reach out to us at (604) 513-9428.

1. Compliance Concerns
First, you need to be sure that your data is not only stored securely but is also sent back and forth to your backup solution properly. This is especially true if your industry is subject to any government mandates concerning how data must be handled, as the penalties for non-compliance can be just as severe as the influence of data loss would be.

Whether you manage your own solution or leverage a vendor to keep your data securely backed-up, the same severity applies. The size of your business has no influence, either, despite many smaller organizations having a difficult time keeping up with these regulations. These businesses are especially benefited by the availability of outsourced IT resources, as these providers are better prepared to see to these compliances and minimize any risk.

2. Costs and Scalability
It is also important to recognize your needs, including the costs that fulfilling those needs may incur (like how much a cloud provider charges for you to download your backed-up data). Before you select a particular cloud provider, make sure that you have considered all of these charges.

Furthermore, a backup solution that can only keep you safe from major disasters is one that overlooks a huge percentage of the actual issues you are apt to face. Sure, ransomware attacks and fires happen, but so do hard drive failures and other causes of small-scale data loss. Every strategy you enact needs to be documented properly, with useful information shared clearly, succinctly, and actionably.

3. Lack of Management or Testing
If your company is ever in the position that it needs to lean on a data backup, they’re going to need to lean on a leader to ensure that this process goes without a hitch. In many cases, this role would fall on your shoulders - but what if something goes down while you (or whoever is in charge of managing the recovery process) aren’t there?

This is why you need to keep a comprehensive, up-to-date plan prepared for just this occasion, a hard copy ready to be referenced on-site as well as one digitally stored in your backup files.

In addition to this preparation, you also need to make sure that the backups you’ve prepared actually work in the first place. A backup will do you no good if you can’t recover the data from it, after all. Make sure that, just as you would a fire drill, you practice utilizing the backup on occasion.

How Coleman Technologies Can Help
We have the expertise and capability to put together just this kind of strategy for you and your employees to leverage. That way, you can be confident that your disaster recovery won’t just be a new disaster to deal with. Reach out to us at (604) 513-9428 to learn more today.