Luis Alvarez Discusses Coronavirus & Cybersecurity
Alvarez Technology Group’s very own CEO Luis Alvarez joined host Mark Carbonaro on Power Talk Radio to discuss how coronavirus affects data security, and what business owners and managers can do to keep their employees secure at home.
That’s why cloud solutions and remote access tools are so vital. With the right IT set up, employees can do their work from home just as easily as they can at the office.
This is what Alvarez Technology Group CEO Luis Alvarez joined host Mark Carbonaro on Power Talk Radio to talk about. The Alvarez team took a proactive approach to providing IT support during this quarantine, offering to extend service to clients’ homes if they would prefer to work remotely.
“We didn’t want IT to be an impediment to making that decision,” says Luis. “That opened the flood gates, and now we have a number of clients who want it set up so that their employees can do what they need to do from their houses.”
The #1 Most Important Consideration For Remote Work
Luis and Mark discussed the fact that this pandemic will be like open season for cybercriminals. When businesses start prioritizing remote access to data over the security of that data, they make an easy target for hackers.
“You’ve got to make sure that you don’t compromise security to expedite access,” says Luis. “There are safe and secure ways to make things like working from home possible.”
Think of it this way – at the office, everything is protected by the same set of cybersecurity solutions – firewalls, antivirus software, etc. These are defenses that you’ve invested in, and can trust. Is the same true of your employees’ home networks and personal devices? Probably not.
The bottom line is that the easier it is for your staff to access business data, the easier it becomes for cybercriminals to do so as well. The more people you have accessing your data remotely, the more variables there are in your cybersecurity defense.
That’s why you need to take additional steps to secure remote access:
- Deploy a Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution that allows staff members to access business data securely
- Make sure to disable split-tunneling on your VPN so that when employees are connected to business data, they don’t also have an Internet connection open that could compromise security
- Deploy defensive software on employees’ home devices
- Check home Wi-Fi network settings to make sure they are password protected
- Make sure that security systems are up to date
Another tip that Luis and Mark discussed was the potential to use mobile hotspots as a secure connection. These connections are often more secure than conventional Wi-Fi.
“For clients that have hotspots or can use their phones as hotspots, it makes sense for the business to offer to offset the costs of data usage, just to add another layer of security,” says Luis.
