Maintaining Business Continuity Amid Epidemic Response

After a tumultuous week which concluded with President Trump declaring a national emergency in response to novel coronavirus concerns, companies have been enacting their business continuity plans and instructing their employees to work remotely, some for the first time. As a company who has enabled remote-work since our founding, we wanted to share how we make certain our people work remotely in the most effective and secure manner. We offer these lessons learned to help those mitigating these disruptions and challenges.

How We Do Business Securely

Live Anywhere, Work Anywhere

Our employees work from home but also work where our clients need them. This means we understand how to work securely from home, our office, and our clients’ offices. In normal circumstances, these include hotels, sky clubs, coffee shops. If you have questions or concerns, we can help. 

Cloud-Based Availability

We help companies securely migrate to the cloud and it’s been our home since the beginning. Everything we utilize for internal operations and client-facing business is cloud-based – allowing Trility to seamlessly operate from anywhere with no disruption. Cloud security and reliability are a No. 1 priority to us. With the majority of breaches in 2019 due to cloud storage misconfigurations, we must continue to be diligent and never compromise when it comes to security.

Secure Device Management

As businesses transition to work from home, reinforce device management policies, and determine if they are secure enough. Our team is geographically distributed across the country. As a best-practice, consider some of these approaches we use:

• Hard drives must have full disk encryption
• Screens must be locked when you are away from the keyboard
• Screens must be set to auto-lock after five minutes if you are away from the keyboard and forget to lock
• Do not store customer data locally to the laptop
• Don’t attach your laptop to insecure public wireless networks – every time it is available, use VPN
• Use modern operating systems and tools and keep them current at all times

Lines of Communication

The days of operational 8-5 hours are gone. Maintain several lines of communication in order to meet the needs of clients, partners, and employees. We use Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Confluence, JIRA, GSuite (Google Productivity Suite), and several more to align with our client’s preferred use of communication. Find one that works for your business.

• Have dynamic communication tools to serve as a foundation for most written communications.   This is preferably not email. 
• Use communication tools that allow for one-to-one, group, team, and enterprise-wide communications through various channels – video and voice-capable ones are ideal.  
• Provide a stream of news and updates to employees throughout the organization.
• Integrate the communication tool via APIs to your various productivity tools like your project management, ERP, CRM, or issue tracking systems.  
• For dynamic document collaboration, use cloud-based tools with traceable version control.

Redundant Systems

No one person or location holds information, and backups are always in place. Whether it’s a person, a process, or line of code, we have systems and backups for completing work and documentation is always provided because we never want our clients handcuffed to us.

Start Simple. Then Automate. And Always Be Secure.

Under normal circumstances, we help companies defend or extend their market share in an era of rapid disruption by simplifying, automating, and securing each iteration. The era of disruption has been disrupted. We are here to help.

The Internet is full of noise right now. Big problems need to be solved, and they can’t all be Googled. If you are in need of sound advice, reach out to our team.