Hello again, everyone and welcome to our COVID-19 Office Hours.
For those of you in the states, I hope that you had a great long weekend. We’ll get started in a second.
Our first question comes from Ethan K.
How do you see hours changing for employees, and free working?
Do you foresee more working from home?
Does Webroot have a plan to offer to license home devices for companies too, similar to Sophos?
Next up, Arnold wants to know:
Will Webroot offer some kind of VPN products to prepare for more remote workforce?
Next up, Arnold wants to know:
Will Webroot offer some kind of VPN products to prepare for more remote workforce?
We sure do and it’s a great idea when working remote
https://www.webroot.com/us/en/home/products/vpn-wifi-security
Our next question comes from Stephan who wants to know about how we (Webroot) have adjusted the way we conduct business:
How has this pandemic affected the way Webroot conducts business, all the way from Partner support, to tech support to product development - Stephan M
COVID has changed many aspects of our daily lives, including how many look at security. George wants to know:
Has the pandemic affected security measures? - George G
Eric writes in:
I'm curious if there has been an uptick in infections with more people working from home. - Eric M
What measures do support engineers take when they visit customer sites? - Costas T
Can a global pandemic relax our cybersecurity standards?
Do you feel like COVID has made us relax our cyber security? - Anestis P
What measures do support engineers take when they visit customer sites? - Costas T
In all my years of working in support and at Webroot, there isn’t any instance of support engineers at customer sites. They are remote support only - but we can still solve any issues our customers have and if any physical direction is needed (booting into special modes, ect), the tech on the phone with our support can perform the tasks.
The office environment will be unfamiliar to many when people start going back.
How do you manage to keep distance inside office but keep the productivity up? - Athanasios M
How do you see hours changing for employees, and free working?
Do you foresee more working from home?
Does Webroot have a plan to offer to license home devices for companies too, similar to Sophos?
Ethan’s question has a number of points.
How do you see hours changing for employees, and free working?
There is no doubt that working hours are more flexible if you are WFH, particularly with all the pressures and in some cases freedom that brings, depending on personal circumstances. Flexibility is the word that springs to mind. We all will still have meetings to attend and be part of and commitments to deliver on-time. So, as an employee, I have a duty to my colleagues to deliver but more flexibility on when I do certain types of work.
Do you foresee more working from home?
There is no doubt that WFH is here to stay. OpenText/Webroot have permanently closed many offices and see WFH as a way of widening the talent we can attract. Every businesses needs will be different but over the next couple of years I suspect WFH will become a common work practice.
Do Webroot have a plan to offer to license home devices for companies too, similar to Sophos?
No. As we work on a per device usage policy we do not care if the device/license is used either at home or in the office, on a personal device or a company owned device. You shouldn’t really need an extra licenses. We have also offered 60-day free trials to help.
How has this pandemic affected the way Webroot conducts business, all the way from Partner support, to tech support to product development - Stephan M
Apart from the obvious that we are not working in the office and meeting physically we have all moved to WFH, using Microsoft Teams to keep aligned and collaborating.
On the more external parts of our business our SE’s have had to use remote tools to connect to customers and we have not attended any events that we miss sorely as it enables us to keep a dialogue with our Clients outside the misinformation rumor mills.
So we have adjusted by collaborating more often and also still having office chats by holding social team meetings etc.
George G’ question: Has the pandemic affected security measures?
Yes, depending on how a Customer was set-up prior to the pandemic, and even if Remote working or WFH was in place, it’s important to re-assess and understand where data is being worked on, stored, secured and protected.
So measures like VPN’s, encryption, better Identity and Access controls, multi-factor authentication, securing home devices if used for work have all meant looking at how to ensure data is as secure as possible. The pandemic should have in fact made security measures even more important.
Eric writes in:
I'm curious if there has been an uptick in infections with more people working from home. - Eric M
Yes, we've seen many malware campaigns utilize covid19 tactics, We've seen 2% of all COVID websites created in past 2 months were malicious. 2000% increase in malicious files with ZOOM in their name. We’ve also seen over a 40% increase in unsecured RDP machines for remote working.
A question from Athanasios on - How do you manage to keep distance inside office but keep the productivity up?
Not easy. Employees will need to use masks. Meetings need to limit those physically attending. Meetings need to held in virtually in the office. Hygiene practices for cleaning common areas and rest room facilities need to be a lot more rigorous. At Webroot only those with a dedicated offices can actually go into the office from the beginning of June and none need to even consider this until September 8th.
Saying that, Productivity is about having empowered staff and clear lines of communication and being able to collaborate and share as well as work in isolation. If those tools are in place, as we have already found at Webroot, productivity when WFH is sometimes even greater than in the office!
Can a global pandemic relax our cybersecurity standards?
Do you feel like COVID has made us relax our cyber security? - Anestis P
I don’t think people have relaxed intentionally, if anything they’re trying to be more aware of COVID19 themed scams, but unintentional consequences have definitely impacted security. For example, since the work from home orders, we’ve seen over 40% increase in insecure RDP. Just because it’s easy to turn on and built into windows does not mean it’s secure. By default ANYONE can request a connection to the machine and can scan for it, AND they have unlimited number of login attempts with no alerts or lockout triggering. This criminals will just brute force their way into these environments and when a criminal gets desktop access to a machine, its usually game over. Securing RDP one of the most important tasks for IT admins
Thanks to everyone for joining us today and to @GeorgeA and @TylerM for helping us answer questions.
If anyone has any additional questions, be sure to stop by next Tuesday at 1:00 PM MT. or add your questions here and we’ll do our best to answer all of them.
Until next week, stay resilient!
