IT and Business Insights for SMB Solution Providers

Building the Ultimate Work-From-Home Security Stack: Page 5 of 5

While there’s no one perfect recipe for protecting remote employees, channel pros have learned a lot in the last year about what works best. By Rich Freeman
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WORK-FROM-HOME devices and networks are vulnerable to attack and difficult to monitor, manage, and secure.
CHANNEL PROS MUST EMPLOY a layered combo of tools and techniques to secure data, endpoints, networks, and network connections.
CLEARLY WRITTEN and firmly enforced security policies are essential, along with ongoing security awareness training.
IT PROVIDERS should protect their own remote workers with the same technologies and best practices they use with customers.

Eating Your Own Security Dog Food

Desk jockeys everywhere have been working from home since the arrival of COVID-19 last year. That very much includes channel pros, most of whom have been providing help desk services and performing remote maintenance from a collection of living rooms and kitchen tables instead of cubicles at the office. Protecting those technicians from attackers who were already targeting MSPs before the pandemic has been as big a priority for many channel pros as safeguarding customers.

Nancy Sabino

Nancy Sabino, of SabinoCompTech, has employed a simple principle to guide that process: Embrace every security tool and policy she recommends to customers within her own business. “If we’re asking our clients to do something, we ourselves have to test it and implement it within our own environment,” she says.

Stanley Kaytovich, of QWERTY Concepts, has taken a similar approach, enforcing multifactor authentication among his technicians and deploying an automated security awareness training solution that tests users for susceptibility to phishing attempts. The system quickly fooled someone who thought he knew better, in fact—Kaytovich himself.

“I kind of just wasn’t thinking, and I failed this test,” he says. So far, none of his techs have made the same mistake.

Images: iStock

 

About the Author

Rich Freeman's picture

Rich Freeman is ChannelPro's Founding Editor

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