The world is in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, causing widespread disruption and accelerating the onset of remote policies as businesses, cities, and schools grapple with safeguarding their employees, citizens, and students. With the number of cases rapidly increasing, technology firms are playing a supportive role for businesses allowing work-from-home to their employees with their offerings.
Boston-based LogMeIn is giving governments/municipalities, educational institutions, healthcare organisations, and non-profits free, company-wide use of its collaboration and remote access products for three months. Its “Emergency Remote Work Kits” cover solutions for meetings and video conferencing, webinars and virtual events, remote IT support/management and remote device access, to ensure these critical organisations stay connected when it matters most.
Kredily, a Bangalore-based HR tech and fintech startup, has started providing its attendance management app at no cost to companies. The solution helps companies keep track of the time their employees spend on their jobs, while at the same time helping them analyse their work patterns and productivity through advanced reporting systems. It also facilitates companies to track working hours through both web browsers and mobile devices. “Kredily uses the web-based authentication system to mark attendance, thus completely ruling out the possibility of spreading the virus through human contact,” explains its founder and CEO, Devendra Khandegar.
Stratbeans, a fast-growing learning management solutions firm, is offering a suite of offerings such as Knowledge Management System (KMS), Learning Management System (LMS) and Rapid Content Authoring Platform Articulate 360. These not only equip businesses to share information in real-time but also facilitate collaboration among employees in a contactless manner.
Companies can leverage these solutions in order to retain the productivity of the employees working remotely, says Sameer Nigam, CEO and co-founder, Stratbeans.
“With Articulate 360, subject matter experts get easy-to-use tools for recording computer screen and audio, and also interacting in a cloud-based collaboration area, where all work items such as videos, PPT, PDF can be stored and reviewed in a controlled workflow. Employees can work one after the other on a job remotely, while supervisors can monitor work compilations and review the work items through KMS, thus ensuring that the operations run smoothly,” he says.
While medical experts are rushing to find a cure against Coronavirus, cybercriminals are equally busy trying new techniques and tactics to milk money on businesses and individuals by exploiting the public panic on this current pandemic. Kaspersky has continuously been detecting new attack tools being used by malicious threat actors related to Covid-19. “It is a known fact that once devices are taken outside of a company’s network infrastructure and are connected to new networks and Wi-Fi, the risks to corporate information increase. It is high time that we boost not only our physical immunity but also our networks’ security against these damaging attacks,” says Stephan Neumeier, managing director for Asia Pacific at Kaspersky.
The IT security firm cites a number of steps that can be taken to reduce the cyberrisks associated with home working (See box).
7 steps to safe working from home:
Provide a VPN for staff to connect securely to the corporate network.
All corporate devices—including mobiles and laptops—should be protected with appropriate security software.
Always implement the latest updates to operating systems and apps.
Restrict the access rights of people connecting to the corporate network.
Ensure that staff are aware of the dangers of responding to unsolicited messages.
Enforce the use of legitimate software, downloaded from official sources.
Make backups of essential data
