IT Roundtable: Enabling Productive Remote Workforces

CompTIA’s IT team discusses how many companies were affected by employees working remotely during the pandemic. It also shares best practices for IT departments and offers recommendations to improve productivity and create secure remote work environments. This article first appeared in CompTIA World magazine Issue 8. In March, IT departments all over the world jumped to action when companies announced that their employees would be working remotely due to the COVID-19 epidemic. This is CompTIA’s IT team: Robert Rohrman (Vice President, IT Infrastructure); Edgar Flores (Senior Manager, Network Operations); and Wendell Thacker (Manager, Network Operations) discussing the challenges faced by many companies, best practices for IT departments, as well as recommendations for moving forward to increase productivity and secure remote work environments.
Seth Robinson: Everyone was in a situation where they needed to quickly connect their employees from home. This was not something that many companies had ever attempted before. Can you describe the IT department’s reaction to this shift?
Robert Rohrman However, if your company did not have the ability to work from home, it was imperative that you take immediate action.
There are many ways to enable remote work. IT teams needed to consider their company holistically, and then look at it from the employee’s perspective. What tools and technologies did they need to perform their jobs? The IT staff had to think about security. What was a company willing and able to take as a risk? They then had to choose a solution and put it into practice.
Seth: Training everyone as an enabled endpoint was the first step in the equation. What about making sure that everyone has a device that works?
Wendell Thacker: As an IT professional, you ask yourself, “How can I make my career more secure?” You want to ensure that people have the right hardware or devices. This is the same advice that I give to family members who ask me for recommendations on laptops or personal computers. It all depends on what you will use it for. You’re saying that if someone is a web developer, they will need lots of RAM and a fast processor speed, as opposed to my grandma, who will need to check her email.
Edgar Flores: You also need to establish a baseline so that all devices meet certain requirements. Companies with a baseline for laptops were less overwhelmed than those without one.
Seth: Security is a concern for remote work environments. We have also seen an increase of phishing attacks. What security tools were crucial when companies made this switch?
Robert: Security and convenience are often at odds. When one goes up, the other goes down. The coronavirus outbreak caused a significant increase in security concerns. Companies were forced to allow everyone to work remotely.
Wendell: The rise in phishing scams has been difficult. People are always the weakest link. Seth: I was recently asked by someone what blocks IT teams from doing what they need. It has a lot to do with culture. If you want to be strategic with IT and futureproof your organization, the IT team must create a ROI statement that states, “If we invest this amount, this is what we expect.” This hasn’t been possible in the past because IT has always been a cost center. How important is IT’s ability to demonstrate value to upper management in the future?
Seth: I was recently asked by someone what blocks IT teams from doing what they need. It has a lot to do with culture. If you want to be strategic with IT and future-proof, the IT team must create a ROI statement. This will tell them what they expect to see if they invest this amount. This has not always been possible because IT has been a cost center. How important is IT’s ability to demonstrate value to upper management in the future?
Robert: A startup can move to 100% cloud very quickly. They don’t worry about the past and don’t have any old databases servers. This is a common problem for companies, especially when there are hundreds of employees. There are also old habits. There was no urgency to allow staff to work remotely until this year. Corporate directives changed quickly once the urgency became apparent.
Modernizing applications and making them secure is a challenge. It’s more than just moving one component to a more convenient location. What is the “bring your device” policy? What security implications does this have?