How to Keep Your Company Cyber Safe Throughout the Pandemic

Cyber Security During Pandemic - Your business remaining secure during Coronavirus

As of today, and at an accelerating rate over the coming weeks, many businesses across the globe will be closing their offices and enforcing a work from home policy in a bid to minimise the rapid spread of COVID-19. With so many employees out of office and unable to carry out face-to-face meetings productivity is sure to suffer.

At the time of writing this article there have been over 165,000 diagnosed cases of Coronavirus and over 6,400 deaths in 146 countries. We’ve never been so populous, so mobile and so well informed. This is a global crisis at a scale we have never experienced before. For the travel and hospitality industries this goes way beyond the financial crash of 2008 and Hospitality Net claims that Covid-19 will hit the NYC Hospitality industry worse than 9/11.

The directives to self-isolate will continue to ramp up by governments and in many cases global organisations have preemptively made the decision to protect staff against the threats of ‘Coronavirus’. We will see the increasing use of enforced ‘Social Distancing’, which CDC defines as “remaining out of congregate settings, avoiding mass gatherings and maintaining distance (approximately 6 feet) from others when possible.”

Fortunately, many industries don’t require the same level of face to face contact to continue to operate effectively as the hospitality industry. Within these more “flexible” industries many well prepared organisations will have the ability to enforce a highly productive work-from-home policy for employees, allowing them to go about their day to day work activities without major disruption. For those employees it is important to reduce the level of distraction faced within their home environment and ensure that they can be as healthy as possible in order to remain productive.

How can WFH employees reduce distractions and stay healthy?

Your home may become your office for the next few weeks so it is important that those around you know that this is the case. Home life and work mode must become separate in order to ensure that productivity does not drop. Those with a dedicated ‘office’ will have their own space to work without distraction, but many won’t have this facility, and won’t be the only people having to work from home. It’s important to allocate where you will work from, where you will take calls from, and in a time where video conferencing will likely become important make sure this location is fully planned also.

While working from home it’s very important for employees to replenish themselves, exercise and take their rest times. Employees should take a break to get lunch and when doing so put your laptop away, enjoy having the ability to have lunch with family, friends or with something on the TV.

Many employees are used to a commute to work which allows them to exercise and often clear their heads. At this time there is a high likelihood that gyms and activity centres will close to minimise the spread of COVID-19, so employees may need other ways to get endorphins up and possibly get your blood moving. Walks and exercise apps that can be used at home are highly recommended.

Finally, when your work is done for the day, you can’t necessarily ‘leave the office’ but try your best to detach from your laptop and work emails. Don’t burn yourself out!

So will business decisions come to a halt during this time?

It’s no secret that many large business decisions are made face to face with a handshake. The latter has been discouraged for a number of weeks now, but with face to face meetings also being discouraged, how can organisations continue to make these important decisions?

Many organisations are procuring systems that allow for video conferencing with clients to make remote meetings more personalised, but many choose to cancel a meeting rather than making important decisions using productivity tools that simply aren’t designed to be highly secure.

Salt Communications has been working closely for many years with clients who require exactly this, a tool that ensures complete privacy for users who need to make important decisions without being in the same room.

Our solution includes an incident response tool to communicate regular updates to staff around office opening status, generalised tips for how to work from home and urgent information that needs to be transmitted to chosen users.

Organisations use Salt Communications to protect trade secrets and other sensitive, strategic and proprietary information when communicating on mobile devices.

You can deploy Salt Communications to every decision maker in your company TODAY to keep them safe and secure and to drive your business forward in this uncertain time.

For more information on this article, or to talk to a member of the Salt Communications team, please contact info@saltcommunications.com.

About Salt Communications

Salt Communications is a multi-award winning cyber security company providing a fully enterprise-managed software solution giving absolute privacy in mobile communications. It is easy to deploy and uses multi-layered encryption techniques to meet the highest of security standards. Salt Communications offers ‘Peace of Mind’ for Organisations who value their privacy, by giving them complete control and secure communications, to protect their trusted relationships and stay safe. Salt Communications is headquartered in Belfast, N. Ireland, for more information visit our website.

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