Best practices for remote working · Hosting of online team meetings with screen sharing and/or...

April 2020

Best practices for remote working

Businesses are attempting to maintain critical operations amidst challenges of office closures, social distancing, and travel restrictions.

Many companies are attempting to adopt a remote work-from-home workforce at an unprecedented pace to ensure business continuity. This guidance provides best practices to ensure you can accelerate adoption of digital workplace solution quickly and securely.

Businesses have moved to work-from-home at a record pace

2 PwC I Best practices for remote working

What is digital workplace and how?

A digital workplace is an intelligent environment in which employees maximise the use of technology to work remotely, collaborate in real time, maximiseproductivity, and be empowered to manage their work.


How do we maintain operations when our office is closed?

Events out of our control have caused business to close offices. You need to rapidly move you workforce to Work-from-Home, and keep business going.

What systems do remote workers need to access?

Events have necessitated that the entire workforce is remote. You need to prioritiseand ensure which assets and applications are accessible.

How do we provide secure remote access?

Your business productivity depends on your workforce’s ability to collaborate. You need to provide your workforce with secure access to critical assets and applications to do their job effectively.

How do we scale to meet the demand of a remote workforce?

Moving to an entirely work-from-home workforce has taxed the demand on hardware to connect as well as the infrastructure that provides access to our employees. You need a way to scale and ensure availability to employees.

How do I manage communicationand training?

You need communication channels and support to ensure our workers understand what is acceptable and expected use of remote assets and access to systems.

Can we still maintain our security and compliance posture?

Your company is laser focused on the challenge of continuing regular business operations with a work-from-home workforce. You need a methodology to support our employees while also ensuring that you are not opening ourselves up to additional threats.

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Office closure events require an entire workforce to leverage remote access technology. Meet this challenge with technologies that grow and shrink with the need.

• Cloud-based collaboration tools are scalable and can be deployed quickly to remote workforce.

• Typical use case of digital collaboration includes:

Instant messaging between individuals and among teams

Online sharing of project and office documents

Hosting of online team meetings with screen sharing and/or videos

Hosting of large scale online townhallmeetings

Voice calling (with no international charges)

• Review VPN bandwidth and license capacity to ensure smooth connectivity to corporate network

Remotely available & scalable

Determine and prioritise applications that are critical for employees’ business operations. Know where your distributed workforce is struggling with surveys and check-in app. Make data-driven decisions, real-time.

• Deploy health survey and check-in apps that allow you to track working location of employees

• Provide technical guidance to employees regarding remote working arrangement

• Provide IT support to teams who are transitioning to remote working

• Implement Information Protection tool to classify sensitive corporate data and setup application policies and permissions according to data sensitivity.

• Enable data loss prevention tools or features to identify sensitive information and prevent accidental sharing of sensitive information

Prioritise access to critical assets −Know your employee’s needs

Integrate a strong security and privacy foundation so that businesses can focus on maintaining critical business operations without creating compliance issues.

• Enable multi-factor authentication to protect employee identity from being tampered.

• Deploy mobile device management tools to manage and secure BYOD and corporate-owned devices.

• Rigorously measure and enforce stringent security standards on administrative accounts and systems, such as Active Directory, identity systems, management tools, security tools, administrative workstations, and associated operating systems.

• Detect abuse of privileges, accounts, or data by detecting anomalous activity of an account. Alert on unusual activity to enable rapid investigation and response.

Ensure strongsecurity & privacy principles



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Confirm your solutions are governed by controls that ensure the availability and security of remote private access, and make sure your employees know what's expected of them and resources available to them.

• A remote working security policy should define which forms of remote access the organisation permits, which types of telework devices are permitted to use each form of remote access, the type of access each type of teleworker is granted, and how user account provisioning should be handled.

• It should also cover how the organisation's remote access servers are administered and how policies in those servers are updated.

• The telework security policy should be documented in the system security plan.

Company will need to provide the incident response and crisis management support necessary to address critical security issues as they arise. Ensure an Incident Response team is ready to help minimise the impact of unplanned events.

• Define roles and responsibility, as well as process in handling incident.

• Establish operational capabilities to monitor alerts, investigate incidents, initiate remediation actions, and integrate lessons learned.

• Evaluate the need for security operations centre service to provide 24 x 7 security incident monitoring and response.

There are technology options to consider, some rapid, some take time. Carefully consider the interplay of your options so you maintain a secure business environment and maintain your cyber defenses.

• The cloud delivers fundamental technology benefits that can improve business agility, reduce costs, accelerate time to market, and enable expansion into new markets.

• Document your strategy by defining the drivers and expected outcome from the perspectives of business, technology and user experience.

• Prioritise technology options by business needs and security requirements.

• Conduct user pilot testing to explore new tools, while minimising adoption risks. Collect initial feedback for rapid remediation.



Governance and support Incident response & resilienceTechnology options

Embrace online meetings: Make sure all meetings include a virtual “join” option so that team members can join from wherever they are working. Turn video on so your team can interact face to face and feel more connected. To minimise distractions, switch it off when not in use.

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Communicate often: Your rhythm with online work from home might look different than it does in the office. Communicate your schedule to your coworkers so that they know when to reach out to you.

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Be mindful and inclusive: A crowded conference call can make it difficult for people to share their opinions. Pause frequently to allow time for questions and remind attendees that they can use the chat window to share their thoughts.

Bring the team together: Working remotely can feel a bit isolating. It’s important to create opportunities for the whole team to virtually get together, whether it’s large brainstorms over screen sharing or daily check-ins over a virtual coffee.

Manage your work online: Leverage online file sharing tools to upload and share documents among project teams. Co-edits and provide comments directly in the document without sending it back and forth.

Have fun: Use collaboration tools, such as Teams and Slack to encourage fun activities and challenges to maintain morale. Holding a photo contest or praising employees for creative ideas are great ways to help the team stay positive, engaged and energised.

Tips on remote working

Contacts

Kenneth WongCybersecurity & Privacy Asia Pacific and Mainland China/Hong Kong Leader

+852 2289 [email protected]

Felix KanPartner, Cybersecurity & PrivacyCo-founder of DarkLab


Kok Tin GanPartner, Cybersecurity & PrivacyFounder of DarkLab


© 2020 PricewaterhouseCoopers Limited. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the Hong Kong member firm, and may sometimes refer to the PwC network. Each member firm is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details.

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Best practices for remote working · Hosting of online team meetings with screen sharing and/or...

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