At first glance, when Ontario’s waste recycling regulator told its staff to start working from home March 17 due to the COVID-19 crisis, it didn’t appear to be a problem for CIO John Pinard.
After all, the staff had corporate-issued laptops, so there wasn’t a rush to buy PCs.
But, he told a webinar on Tuesday, “it was an eye-opener” with a range of challenges. Some staff didn’t have a desk in their residences. Others didn’t have a safe enough router for protecting their home computers from a cyberattack, let alone protect their organization-issued computer.
Fortunately, he said, as a young agency — the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority is only three years old — all of its applications were cloud-based. For accessing the main application, Salesforce, the staff was told to use a virtual private network (VPN).
However, that had its own challenges. “One of the things we’ve run into when doing videoconferencing doesn’t work that well over VPN,” he said, “so we’re educating our staff that when their doing videoconferencing to disconnect VPN, then re-connect when you need access to corporate data.”
Meeting security problems is about educating staff, he said. But, if agency management decides that working from home will be the norm then buying staff additional security hardware to protect them may be necessary, as well as purchasing a next-generation firewall to give more traffic visibility, he added.
Pinard was on a panel discussing how IT deals with securing a remote workforce at the week-long siberXchange conference run ..
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