Working on Home Equipment
Working From Home on Home Equipment
Some of our clients took their workstations home when their offices decided (or were told) to close. Others already had laptops, so they were mobile. The rest decided to use their computers at home. For those who wound up working from a home computer, there were a variety of issues; how to log into their network or hosted server; older, slow equipment; the need for speakers and/or a camera for those remote meetings; some even needed to remotely access their office workstation which had specific software, but they couldn’t go to the office.
Although we don’t include home computers in our support and maintenance agreements, things were upside down, so of course, we helped any of our clients with whatever they needed. We made and posted recommendations on remote access options, too.
So now it’s been a few weeks and it’s time to regroup. If you still have people working remotely on home computers, here are some things that need attention, as soon as possible. Whether the computer is accessing your network, working on email, attaching documents, opening documents, or many things in between, they’re doing it with your data, over your network, and these machines may not be secure!
- Step up and pay for a quality anti-virus software on these home computers.
- Offer to pay for some Tech Support. This might include changing the default or lame password on their home router, as an example.
- Offer to pay for some Tech help to update patches on their home computer, run a malware scan, and do a health check.
- I can’t tell you how many of these home computers turned out to be Windows 7! If they’re going to continue working from home, even if it’s only part of the week, purchase a replacement computer for them, one with Windows 10 on it.
No one is looking to spend money unnecessarily, but if your remote workers require computers to do their work, make sure they have a safe computer. This pandemic isn’t the only ‘virus’ out there, and you don’t want to have your company’s data infected. They’re connecting to your network, opening and sending company email, opening and sharing documents – if they’re infected from that home computer, YOU are now at risk. – CMW