As Digital Journal reported just a few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg had announced that most of its employees would be allowed to continue to work from home through the end of 2020. We noted that for a major corporation to take this measure, this signaled that a new ‘normal’ is upon us.
It seems that this ‘new normal’ isn’t just a transitory aspect of workplace culture. Facebook has shifted the position further in recommending that many of its workforce work from home permanently, with hardly any reason to come into the office – period. This is a reflection of the company operating just as well with most of its workers not pitching up to corporate headquarters or to other Facebook offices around the world.
The company will move tens of thousands of jobs to remote working, according to The Guardian, with up to half of employees working from home within 5-10 years. To achieve this goal Facebook will take to adapt operations to remote work for the long-term.
Looking at the practicalities of home working for Digital Journal, Mat Newfield, Chief Information Security Officer for Unisys, shares five tips for companies to consider when moving to a virtual model. These are:
Tip #1: Large scale work from home shifts require a significant amount of upfront work to ensure corporations are not introducing unnecessary risks to their companies.
Tip #2: Topics such as training and ongoing education around the risks employees can introduce through their home networks must be incorporated. Do employees patch their personal equipment? Do they have the basic security components on their personal machines such as Anti-Virus? Do they regularly reboot their home internet devices to ensure they are not infected?
Tip #3: What plans do your corporation have to ensure availability with your working-from-home (WFH) staff? Most people do not have redundant power or internet from their homes, so how will you ensure delivery continuity if people have a power outage or an Internet outage.
Tip #4: How will companies ensure that they will have the ability to quickly patch WFH systems? If they require people to connect to the VPN to do so, what risks will they be introducing?
Tip #5: Education and communication is going to be key. Working from home is very new for so many people in the world. Acceptable Use, as an example, is something most employees do not think about. It will become very important the employees are trained well so that they can comply.
