Coronavirus - COVID-19 – IT Checklist

Supply Chain

• Ask your technology suppliers for their BCP plans.
• Ask suppliers about the possible impact and delays
• Are your IT support partners/staff able to continue to support your business?
• Can your suppliers deliver goods and services during the Coronavirus crisis?

Staff

• Home working - Can staff work from home.
• Equipment - Do they have laptops. Do you have a sign-out log book for those staff borrowing equipment?
• Training - Alert staff of new phishing attacks exploiting people’s interest in this subject.
• Telephony – How are staff contactable?
• Collaboration – how can staff collaborate with each other and their manager while working from home?

Business

• Business continuity - Review your BCP plan. Has this been tested recently?
• International – Consider how the business can function if specific regions are unable to operate?
• Accounts - Must be extra vigilant of email authorisation, from remote staff, to release payments. Review your approval processes.
• Policies – Do you policies provide suitable guidance?
• Insurance – does your insurer cover you for business interruption or if your premises are uninhabitable?
• Alerts & Notifications – do you have the means of alerting all staff during the Coronavirus crisis (other than emails which can be missed)?
• Physical Security – if you premises are vacant for an extended period of time do you have suitable security?
• GDPR – consider the implications of staff copying data to work remotely – could this contain PII? Are these permanent or temporary staff?

Technology

• Premises - Do you have servers in your building? What would happen if you are unable to access these?
• VPN – Should you permit the use of VPNs, and with a higher number of remote workers, are all end-points suitably protected to minimise the risk of viruses traversing the links?
• MFA – Is remote access secured by multi-factor authentication to prevent brute-force attack?
• Internet/Connectivity – Are you connections (office or home workers) capable of supporting access from different locations?
• Telephony – does your solution facilitate remote working?
• Scalability – Are your remote working solutions able to quickly scale to support a greater number of home workers?
• Disaster Recovery – when did you last test your disaster recovery plan?
• Backups – when did you last test your backup solution?
• Management – Can your systems be centrally or remotely managed?

Short-Term Recommendations

• Test alert & notifications – Wavex provide clients their own SMS gateway to send texts to all staff, other solutions are available online.
• Test Remote working – Wavex place clients onto Microsoft Azure providing unlimited remote working capabilities.
• Test BCP – Wavex recommends clients regularly test their business continuity plans and can provide robust workflows to manage these.

Long-term recommendations

• Scalability – consider cloud solutions like Microsoft Azure to provide unlimited scalability and flexibility to quickly change resources.
• Collaboration – consider Microsoft Teams to provide the ultimate work-anywhere solution seamlessly integrated into Office 365.
• Business Continuity – review BCP in light of this Coronavirus crisis.