Peter Moriarty: We have all moved home and we are now
working in a new post pandemic era. What are some of the
challenges that come up for IT security and making sure your
team are well protected in annual remote work? Well, I'm
going to share some those in this video stick around.
I'm an MSP Pete Moriarty, I help businesses systemize, organize
and scale using Google workspace and other technology tools, the
pandemic happened and everyone has moved home. Unfortunately,
many of us just picked up a Zoom account and sat at home and did
the same kind of thing that you were doing in an office. But
many small businesses were not equipped to actually educate and
teach their staff how to have good hygiene with their
technology security at home. I mean, people switch to either
like working on home computers, or working in home locations on
shared computers, you know, logging into their Google Drive
or their Gmail or whatever on their machine. And that comes
with all kinds of potential security risks. And, you know,
like, during the pandemic, we saw a large instance in our
customers starting to have issues with security. Now,
imagine there's two years worth of potential customer data
information sitting on your staffs home computer right now.
And it's not protected by a password. What if that was your
profit and loss statement? Because they're your bookkeeper?
What if it's your customer list, because it's your sales manager?
What if it's information about a confidential project or product
that you're looking to launch, and that's potentially, you
know, going into the wrong place, there are all kinds of
issues that can pop up when people are using home based
computers and the top three that tend to happen are
unfortunately, pretty common. And so these are the things that
we've seen come up with our customers. And I'm going to
share what the challenges are. And then I'm going to share what
some of the solutions are as well. Number one is data
mismanagement. And so that's basically your team. losing
track of where your company data is, for many employees.
Unfortunately, when they're working, they can be a little
bit lacks with their diligence on keeping your files stored in
the right place. For many business owners who switch to
work in the pandemic, whether you're using Dropbox or Google
Drive, many team members will still store files on their
desktop, if they're not using, you know, if they haven't been
trained to use things properly. Or maybe perhaps they're working
on a mobile device, and they work on a piece of media and
they haven't uploaded a backup to Google Drive again, we find
that data tends to turn into a mess, and especially on shared
machines, it can get very, very messy as well. The second thing
that we see is ransomware. So computers becoming infected with
ransomware, or becoming infected with something else happening on
a local computer. And then compounded with the first issue
of data data not being stored in a central location means that
you may even have issue number three, which is data loss. And
so data loss might be someone's home computer is not correctly
backed up and it dies. Or maybe someone has company information
on a laptop, and that gets left on a bus or a train. And then
that's lost as well. So there's three really simple things that
you can do to actually tidy this up and make sure that you have
some stricter policies in place, which are going to help you and
the business to mitigate these kinds of issues or hopefully,
potentially avoid them all together. And number one is
that's going to be device control, making sure that you
actually have a system and a methodology for controlling what
devices each user within your business is able to use with
their work accounts. And what that does is it locks some
things down. And so we use something called device
authorization and that's inside Google workspace. And device
authorization lets you authorize one by one any device that
connects to a Google account. What that means is if you know
Bob, or Mary wants to connect their home computer to your
Google account, you might want to check twice about that or at
least make sure that you're enforcing a policy with them. Do
you have a separate user profile set up? Is Google Chrome signed
in? Does that computer have antivirus is that computer
backed up just in case they save something to their desktop,
these are all the things you can check before you then authorize
that device to actually use your workspace account, you want to
make sure that two factor authentication is enforced
across all devices. We talk about that a lot on the channel.
But also number three is to make sure that you use mobile device
management now that is available for free with your Google
workspace account. And mobile device management allows you to
actually enforce that anyone who connects to your business
account with a mobile phone will actually have a policy enforced.
And so they go to connect with their mobile phone, they sign
into their Google account. And it actually says okay, you need
to install this policy before you can access any data. And it
will enforce them to do certain actions. One of those actions
which we recommend is for them to have a strong passcode set up
on the device. And so that will automatically ensure that no
devices without a passcode can access any of your company data.
And imagine the worst case scenario of that imagine someone
leaves their phone on a train or on a bus seat. Someone else
picks it up. There's no passcode on there, and all of a sudden
they're into Google Drive there into your chat there. into the
email. And I can see absolutely everything to do with your
company Scary, scary stuff. The worst thing that's most likely
to happen with that is someone actually using that information
to scam you internally. Let's say it was your finance manager
who left the phone on the train, they then use the email to
message and send an email to your chat to you and say, Hey, I
need you to make this transfer of $10,000 to this account. And
unfortunately, many business owners fall prey to scams like
that. And they're eventually sending money offshore to
someone else. Number two is a cloud first culture. Having a
cloud first culture means that you and your team are using
cloud based tools. And as much as possible using Cloud
interfaces or browser based interfaces for the way that you
are working. What that actually helps you to do is ensure that
your connections between each person's computer and Google or
whatever tool that you're using are encrypted. And it also means
you can discourage the use of local resources like USB hard
drives or saving things on your desktop. Because when you do
that, what that actually allows is us to have a more uniform
data repository of all of the company information inside your
business. Remember, I said that, you know, one of the big risks
of people working at home on their home computers is other
people sing into them accidentally. And so if you have
a policy and a culture where everything gets stored in Google
Drive, I mean, you can still install the local Google Drive
app if you want to. But as much as possible using the Google
format documents, you know, which, which now will encrypted,
but also making sure that everything is stored inside
Google Drive, not in third party apps, not in other places, but
all in one place. What that does is it makes sure that everything
stays cleaner. Now, there's a little secret trick to this as
well. And the secret trick is to just use Chromebooks, when you
use a Chromebook, everything is stored inside the Chrome OS.
Right now I'm actually using a chrome box, I'll even show you
what it looks like. This is my main work computer. And in here,
I've got all of my files, but each one of those files actually
uploads automatically to Google Drive. And so anytime I save or
download anytime I save a document, it's automatically
going to be saved right down there to my computer, and
encrypted with my Google account, because my Chromebooks
are all my Chromebook are both locked down to my Google
account. And so everything is locked down to the Google
account. And it means the device is safe and secure. Number three
is to check in on your admins. Google workspace has a number of
administration roles. And what that allows is different team
members to access different admin resources. As you have
team members outside of the office and working remotely,
you're going to have a lot less visibility about what's actually
going on in the business. And so if you designate administrators,
they can potentially get access to other areas inside the admin
panel, you want to lock that down to make sure that only
directors or business owners have access to the
administration panel. But while you're there, in the admin
panel, you want to potentially look at some of the reports and
insights inside the workspace admin. And we've got a separate
video just on our top recommended reports for Google
workspace. But from there, what you can actually see is
everything that's going on in the business, who's sharing what
files, who's downloading, what files, what files are shared
externally, and you've got lots of options for seeing everything
going on in the workspace world. Now, I'd love to know what you
thought of this, give us a thumbs up if this was useful for
you drop a comment down below and let me know if I missed
anything, or you've got any additional tips for those
working with remote teams. Now if you're a Google workspace
subscriber, you might be interested in getting some
support from our team if you'd like a security audit, for us to
have a look at everything going on inside your workspace
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that, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
Cheers