Four Mistakes to avoid by MSMEs: Work from Home

This unprecedented lockdown situation has severely impacted our Business Continuity. Emails promoting a plethora of Work from Home solutions are flooding our inboxes. I have a counter viewpoint that we can’t ignore.

 

I am writing this blog on an MSME owner’s perspective who is exploring the provision of Work from Home capabilities for Business Continuity. Please check these common mistakes.

 

 

The lockdown hangover will provoke all of us to overinvest or overspend in work from the home provision for the majority of our workforce. I logically believe that a maximum of 20% of MSMEs’ workforce can work from home. Before you decide to overinvest in Work from Home provisions (laptops, cloud, leased lines, virtual servers, VPN firewalls, remote licenses, etc.), please relate to this point. The majority of your workforce does not have an office-like environment at home, read air conditioning, privacy, ambiance, and bandwidth. They may be living in cramped spaces in joint families. Efficiencies and productivity would be drastically different when they work in an office and work from home.

 

 

In our rage to ensure business continuity, we may try to provide work from home for every employee. Please understand that the job profile of many of your employees requires to oversee, inspect, monitor, control, troubleshoot the activities hands-on by being at the place. It is worthless and futile to provide for work from home for such employees who are activity-dependent. Remember, lockdown means no activities.

 

 

I see many MSMEs resorting to TeamViewer, AnyDesk, Ammy, RDP to work from home. It can be disastrous. By doing so, you are inviting ransomware through the backdoor. Remember, lockdown is temporary, but data loss is permanent. Never use these tools without proper security provisions.

 

 

Your data can be your business secrets, technologies, formulations, designs, drawings, intellectual properties in which you have invested over the years. You might have signed non-disclosure agreements with your customers to assure them of privacy or confidentiality of their data, technology, information, IPR. You can’t allow access to these digital assets on employee’s personal computers at home. You cannot load your data on a cloud server that is accessible to anyone from anywhere. This data is vulnerable to leakage or theft through USBs, Emails, and the Internet. Your work from home provisions must respect and balance this reality.

 

We know this better because we are in this business before the pandemic happened. Please check the points below.

 

A. Don’t buy unnecessary laptops, firewalls, VPN cloud-server. 80% of your employees who have to work from home temporarily, give away their office desktops at home with a wifi dongle. Our product BLACKbox can allow access to their data over VPN with all data leakage and theft prevention policies that are in place. After the lockdown, they return to the office with their desktops.

 

B. Don’t buy unnecessary laptops, firewalls, VPNs. If employees have a personal laptop or desktop, take them on rent for office work. Our unique technology will divide the device into personal and enterprise zones. Enterprise zone will comply with all data loss, leakage, and theft policy. An enterprise zone will also connect with enterprise data over the VPN. An employee can use personal data without admin access to the device. Check the explanatory videos on https://www.synersoft.in/videos/.

 

These are cost-effective solutions offering Utility, Security, and Convenience for your work from home provisions.

 

Best Regards,

 

Founder and CEO,