In the work-from-home scenario, enterprises are focusing on business continuity and data security. Vibhore Shrivastava, Co-founder and MD, VIBS Infosol shares how the company has helped create flexible work environment for the customers while maintaining all security protocols and compliance
As a solution provider, how do you assess the current scenario and the lessons learned? What’s your preparedness to handle such unprecedented situation?
We are all facing one of the toughest times. The whole world is struggling not only from the perspective of health issues, but also managing the economy, which is going to see the major impact post lockdown. The COVID-19 crisis will leave a great learning for all of us.
During any disaster, we always strive to take care of our assets. Since we consider employees as our real assets and we need to stand with them in this unprecedented situation, we immediately applied the policy of WFH for all of them across regions in the country. While working from home, we had initially asked employees to connect whenever there was any requirement. But now, we have completely moved our IT infrastructure to cloud. We have opted for Office 365 for mailing solution and Teams as collaboration tool for audio and video connect internally as well as with customers.
We have also implemented ERP to keep the data handy for our team. In order to manage the internal data and keep the critical data safe, we have a centralised NAS in place. To manage backup related issues arising at the customer level, we have kept a copy of important data on ONE Drive (Office 365 feature) for individual users.
We are also following the ticketing system for support and services, which helped us to be in constant touch with our customers and keep them updated on their tickets. Since we have a strong enterprise customer base, we always keep them on high priority and are standing with them in these critical times to win their trust.
How are you safeguarding your customers’ assets / premises in order to ensure continuity of their business operations?
We are managing majorly enterprise customers who understand the meaning of disaster management. They are always a step ahead to keep their applications and workplace available for their customers and employees. We received multiple requirements from customers when this crisis was about to explode.
A few customers were struggling to arrange laptops for their teams. While doing so, they also realised that they need to have end-point security and keep end-user data management policies in place. They had an assurance that internet is not going to be a major issue, but providing secured connectivity to their employees is more critical. Collaboration tools for virtual meeting and discussions (audio and video), DLP for managing the data at end user level, and secured VPN connectivity among other solution were suddenly in demand.
We have multiple case studies wherein we are helping our customers access their applications in secured manner and helping them to secure the end-user data with a synchronised backup in case of any disaster situation in the near future. Besides, we are also ensuring our customer WFH policy to be more productive with complete business continuity while addressing all compliances and industry specific standards.
With the sudden rise in cyber threats and attacks during this period, how are you ensuring your customers’ data is safe and helping them mitigate risks?
Security is always an important concern raised by the customers. They have a major responsibility to provide data accessibility while managing all possible controls. It is also important for them to ensure safety of data at all levels, whether it is from internal threats or mishandling of data. Ensuring the actual data availability and securing it is what every customer wants to talk about.
Our enterprise customers were earlier more concerned about perimeter security and basic endpoint management solution; however, with the sudden rise in cyber threats and different attack patterns, they are now looking for endpoint threat management suite, including anti-malware, anti-ransomware, EDR, MDR, APT, encryption, anti-phishing and many more. We also ensure that their data is well backed up and secured both at central location and end-point.
During this time of total lockdown, how are you ensuring 24×7 service and support to your customers?
We are utilising this period to refresh organisational processes in terms of creating robust customer support mechanism and focusing on employees’ learning curve, so that they are well-prepared to address all challenges that might crop up in the future. We have already started working on ticketing-based service desk to ensure enhanced customer support within stipulated time frame.
Over the past few years, we have been providing 24×7 support to our customers. In the current scenario, the focus is more on formulating and structuring the support team mechanism that will enable us to promptly respond to the customer requirements.
Highlight some of the challenges being faced in providing service or support to the customers during this period?
For solution providers like us, the major challenge would be to help customers in case of any major breakdown or requirement for physical availability of the support engineer or hardware to manage some activities at their data centre or premises. For remote services, we have a full support mechanism in place. Besides, we have also ensured that our L2 and L3 engineers are always available and just a call away for the customers.
In case of any requirement for physical presence of our engineers, we have created a secured and structured plan to manage on-site support. We also ensure that our on-site engineers get a healthy environment with proper hygiene at the customer premises.
Soon we will witness business models changing, wherein there will be far more remote workers in any organisation. In such scenario, what are the best cyber security practices that your customers should adopt? How would you, as a security solution provider, compliment in such a scenario?
We are also observing this change. Major organisations have already, or are in process of, arranging machines for their employees to manage business productivity and ensure proper WFH management. Customers are planning to create flexible environment and ensuring employees productivity in any critical scenario.
The major concern for customers would be to address availability and security. They need to closely work with us on securing their centralised environment and end-user threat management. Deployment of cloud and secured VPN connectivity would be required, for which, we already have multiple and proven technologies in place. Additionally, we have certified resources and strong customer references wherein our solutions have helped them create flexible work environment while maintaining all security protocols and compliances.
What’s your message to customers, so that they are assured of full support today and in the days to come?
At the outset, we always wanted to be known as customers’ preferred technology services partner. With this aim in mind, we have always been investing in enhancing our engineers’ knowledge and improving skills sets within the organisation. Moreover, we have created a robust IT environment and keep on evolving new technology alignments, which is valued by our customers.
