Protecting Business Data while Working From Home – A Story
These are unprecedented times. The world is battling an unseen enemy and though we are all working from our homes, we are dealing with more than just a pandemic. At Parablu, we understand that these are the times our software is more than just software – it is a way of making life easier for our users – give them one less problem to worry about when their plate is already full. And it is especially humbling and encouraging when we hear from customers who voluntarily let us in on how our solutions helped them. Here’s one such story of a manufacturing conglomerate based out of Mumbai, India.
March 24, 2020
The day the COVID-19 lockdown became official. Our customer was in the middle of a busy week when an emergency notification came from the top asking that employees return home immediately. Even those who were on the way to work were to turn back and go home.
The resultant effect was that whole teams, across cities in India, were now at home and many of them didn’t have access to their work devices. Workers who were in the office left in a hurry grabbing their work computers on their way out – but in some cases, they ended up damaging them in the hustle and scramble of travel that day.
The organization acted immediately. They knew that Parablu’s BluVault was actively backing up endpoint systems of close to 1,500 users nationwide. They authorized employees to start work using their personal devices at home.
Parablu had provided them BluVault as a fully-hosted and managed SaaS solution – which their employees could access no matter where they were – at the office, home or anywhere else. BluVault is highly secure and ensures complete encryption of all data in-flight using TLS 1.2 with strong ciphers. And it also ensures strong encryption while data is at rest in the cloud destination.
Employees once they reached home, were simply able to login to the BluVault portal via a web-browser and download the data they needed to a personal device and start working. Even though BluVault had backed up several terabytes of data over time, employees could granularly pick and choose the folders and files they needed most critically and get started with work. Employees were able to spend more time getting work done and less time trying to get back on the grid.
The COVID-19 pandemic has got a lot of organizations thinking about employees WFH not just as a temporary inconvenience, but as the new normal. In a recently released report, Microsoft says that working from home, is here to stay. “Proportion of weekly calls and meetings with video grew from 21 percent to 43 percent, March 2–March 31.” Tata Consultancy Services has said they are looking at having as much as 75% of their workforce working from home by 2025.
The dynamics of protecting end-user data change dramatically when employees aren’t in the office. Protecting end user data takes on an amplified importance at this time when malware attackers have shown increased activity and insider threats are easier to execute. Time tested methods like using file servers or NAS devices to have employees keep their data – start to fail in these scenarios. Organizations need to start thinking of the cloud and modern protocols like https to keep data safe.
Organizations like our customers were prepared for the pandemic with the right mix of technology and solutions – so their employees could hit the ground running. We tip our hat off to them for managing the crisis so well! It gives us immense satisfaction that we were able to be part of their story of success and resilience in this difficult time. And it inspires us to achieve more from our solutions.
Because we believe that the idea is to put distance between people and bridge the one between pieces of data. As though, you never left your workspace at all.
