IET India's Advisory Issues Caution and Best Practices for Secure Remote Working

The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns around the world has pushed businesses into the biggest remote working experiment of our age. The challenges of remote working are impacting all kinds of organisations albeit at different levels. With almost 100% of the white-collar workforce working from home, organisations are faced with prioritising business continuity as well as securing their data and systems at the same time. The IET's Cybersecurity working group has put together some best practices to be followed at this crucial time to safeguard employees and as well as organisations that are navigating through the new order of remote working.

This advisory note is part of a series brought out by the expert volunteer panel members comprising of solutions to problems that will have a significant impact on the world in the years to come.

Expert authors of the advisory suggest a host of preventive measures at an organisation level including identifying critical business applications, robust and frequent communications between the IT and leadership/senior management team, re-looking at cloud platform dependencies and associated choice of providers, building layered access controls, frequent software updates and enhanced threat intelligence efforts and rapid development and deployment of security patches.

The authors also offer tips to individual employees to do their bit to secure their enterprise data. Simple steps like being cautious about the sites we visit while on the enterprise network, following the IT team's instructions to the T, scheduling periodic data back up and changing the home WiFi password periodically are useful.

The advisory note has been authored by Anand Handa, Project Executive Officer, Interdisciplinary Centre for Cyber Security and Cyber Defence of Critical Infrastructures, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and Arnab Chattopadhyay, Associate Director, IBM as well as Arvind Tiwary, Chairperson - IET Cyber Security Working Group Chair, TiE IoT Forum.

The IET India Advisory notes along with a host of other whitepapers and reports are available for download on our website.

Reach out to the IET for neutral commentary and actionable insights on technology and its impact. You can also download whitepapers, knowledge papers, case studies etc. to make informed choices in an ever-changing world.

About the IET

The IET is one of the world's largest engineering institutions with over 168,000 members in 150 countries. It is also the most multidisciplinary - to reflect the increasingly diverse nature of engineering in the 21st century.

The IET is working to engineer a better world by inspiring, informing and influencing our members, engineers and technicians, and all those who are touched by or touch the work of engineers.

Institution of Engineering and Technology - India

The IET office started operations in India in 2006, in Bangalore. Today, we have over 13,000 members and have the largest membership base for the IET outside of the UK.

Given the increasing global importance of India as an engineering hub our aim is to make an impact that has relevance both locally and internationally. Our strategy is to make a meaningful impact on the overall competency and skill levels within the Indian engineering community and play an influencing role with industry in relation to technology innovation and solving problems of public importance.

We want to do this through working in partnership with industry, academia and government, focussing on the application of practical skills within both learning & career lifecycles, driving innovation and thought leadership through high impact sectors. Our volunteer-led panels are means through which we deliver our strategy. The IET IoT Panel was born out of this focus.

For more details, please visit: india.theiet.org.