In a remote working scenario, it is important for organisations to ensure secure access of their data. Ashok L, MD, Futurenet Technologies, shares more on how this can be achieved
As a solution provider, how do you assess the current scenario and the lessons learned? What’s your preparedness to handle such unprecedented situations?
The current scenario has brought unpredictability and challenges to IT service providers like us, as things have unravelled in a very short span of time. Here, we have learned an important lesson on how do we ensure our employees can work from anywhere in future while keeping data security in place. Since we are already accustomed to Citrix environment, it was easy to handle the prevailing situation where we enabled work-from-home for our employees securely.
How are you safeguarding your customers’ assets / premises in order to ensure continuity of their business operations?
As a first line of defence, there are security guards at the customers’ premises on a 24×7 basis. Secondly, there are access-controlled doors in place, in case of at data centres. There are also CCTV cameras put up and are being monitored continuously.
With the sudden rise in cyber threats and attacks in this period, how are you ensuring your customers’ data is safe and helping them mitigate risks?
With the help of vulnerability assessment and patch management tools, we make sure all our customers’ critical resources are up-to-date. We also ensured data availability with redundant backups and in some places with disaster recovery (DR) sites hosted in cloud.
During this time of total lockdown, how are you ensuring 24×7 service and support to your customers?
We have developed a model in managed services for NOC which includes Remote Infrastructure Management Services (RIMS). A team of skilled and certified engineers work from home to monitor, maintain, and break-fix all our client’s critical and non-critical servers on a 24×7 basis.
Highlight some of the challenges being faced in providing service or support to the customers during this period?
Maintenance activities, manual tape backups, etc could not be easily performed or troubleshoot without physical presence of on-site engineers. We have interim solutions in place to tackle these challenges. Maintenance activities are taken care of, by our RIMS team round-the-clock. Tape backups are replaced by cloud backups or other media backups in remote locations.
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?
Customers need to move to virtual desktop or digital workspace environment. If feasibility with applications is an issue, then we recommend them to adopt Data Leak Prevention (DLP) solutions, where every employee’s machine is accounted for and their activities can be controlled or monitored. We also recommend SSL VPN connectivity with strong encryption algorithms for users to access their data securely.
Even in such situations, the global mantra would be “what you can monitor, allow it; what you cannot monitor, block it”. As a security solutions provider, we orchestrate such solutions to our customers and help them monitor this 24×7.
What’s your message to customers, so that they are assured of full support today and in the days to come?
I was very touched when one of our customers referred to us as ‘doctors’. He said that in this scenario where doctors, government officials, and police are working round-the-clock; as a solution provider, we are also working 24×7 to ensure the business continuity for our customers. Our message for them is – ‘you take care of your health and we will take care of your infrastructure’.
