this is Susan Bradley for CSO Online well what a difference a week makes I
live in the state of California where we are in a shelter-in-place order which
means we're doing our best to work from home and other techniques I know New
York is in the same situation and probably other states will go that way
too this is probably causing you the information technology person to be on
the forefront of the battle to keep businesses of all size able to be
working from home even if it means the majority of your workers are now
remoting in from home if you're one of these folks you may have noticed how
technology has risen to the challenge in some ways and in other ways the vendors
have realized that we have too much on our plates right now to deal with all
the issues here's how some of the ways that the Kovan 19 pandemic is clearly
impacting our windows security posture first off releases and servicing you've
probably seen that Chrome 81 did not ship on schedule and Google announced
that they're pausing upcoming chrome and Chrome operating system releases they
emphasize instead they'll ensure that releases are stable secure and they'll
focus on security rather than features Microsoft as well announced that they're
pushing off the end of life for 1709 it was going to come to an end in April but
now security only releases will be released for that platform from May
until October the final eye update date has been really pushed out to October
13th 2020 instead it remains to be seen if office 365 and office click to run
releases will also be impacted by the Cova to just meant to keep an eye on the
office 365 roadmap and any office 365 alerts you get for any impact on those
platforms remember as well if you have any excess service capacity in your data
center or in your local environment you can stand up 180 day trial versions of
various the Windows Server editions Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server
2016 both allow you to trial it out for 180 days so if you need excess capacity
quickly remember that you can download an ISO and put it in the hyper-v
you can quickly set up remote desktop server or Rd gateway solutions with
these two platforms also remember that you can set up an Open VPN installation
so you could have open VPN server and don't forget to check out the VPN
connectivity you have in your firewall environment Microsoft came out with
instructions on how to optimize your office 365 traffic so it doesn't go
through your firewall and instead goes locally many VPN solutions already
include that capability and they also provide web filtering to your home users
as well so review your options and your VPN solutions to see what you can do to
limit the traffic going back to your home our offices and instead maximize
that throughput to your various locations also look for other solutions
through Azur ID you can use a juror to integrate your Remote Desktop gateway
infrastructure using the network policy server you can also secure the RDP
connection using Azure multi-factor and finally there's step by step protecting
Rd gateway with is your multi-factor all of these can be done in a relatively
short amount of time already several ISPs and the CEO of 18t has indicated
that the impact of all this work from home has changed network traffic before
it would go out of the data centers and now that he sees a lot of blending of
the traffic coming in from home users you may want to reach out to your home
users and let them know how to adjust home cameras so it uses lesser bandwidth
you can also let them know how to customize the throttling inside their
net home networks as well and last but not least don't forget to warn them
about kovat related malware don't forget to send up prevention tips on how they
can make sure that they're not scammed and tricked last but not least make sure
to check out the tech talk from IDG we've got some tips on working from home
zoom setup covered 19 and remote networking and all sorts of other tips
to keep you safe for everyone at CSO online this is Susan Bradley stay safe
and stay well