How to decide between the free options for remote work

Based on information from articles on Vox (3/11/2020) and TechRadar (3/3/2020), major remote work platforms are offering the following usage benefits for free to help organizations enable remote work for their employees:

• WebEx: Free accounts can host meetings up to 100 people for unlimited amounts of time.
• Zoom: Free accounts are no longer subject to a 40-minute maximum meeting length.
• Google: G Suite subscription holders get free Hangout Meet (enterprise features) for through July 1, 2020.
• Microsoft: Offering anyone its premium version of Teams for free for six months and has lifted existing user limits on its free version. (Note: if you have an Office 365 business or enterprise subscription, Teams premium is already included in that subscription for free.)

The question then becomes which of these is best for your organization? Here are the criteria that we recommend you consider:

• If you are already an Office 365 or G Suite user then pretty much by default you will want to take advantage of their free offerings. Both offerings just require activation of the features and you don’t have to create new user accounts or remember new passwords. Plus you’ll gain the additional benefits of presence (being able to see who is online) and strong integration with the rest of the products that you’re already using.
• If you aren’t an Office 365 user but are an Office 2016 or Office 2019 user, we still recommend considering the Teams option because if you decide you like it, it will be easy for you to continue to use it after the trial period ends.
• Zoom and WebEx are good standalone options and have a really quick setup as well. The challenge becomes account setup and security, especially if you are having all employees sign up individually for the free accounts. If you are dealing with any personally identifiable information (PII) like social security numbers, bank routing numbers, and credit card numbers, we definitely recommend that you sign up for the business level subscriptions of these products to ensure that you have control over the accounts and particularly the video and audio recordings that they may produce.

Note that all of these assume that your employees have a laptop or computer at home that they can use to work on. This is where Office 365 and G Suite users will have an advantage since those products can be used on home computers via web apps, or Office 365 subscriptions allow installs on home computers and mobile devices.

If your workforce is desktop based, then you will need to use one of the remote access technologies to give employees access to their work desktops and internal files. Here are some of the more established providers of this software (in alpha order): (1) GoToMyPC, (2) LogMeIn, and (3) TeamViewer. With these, you must first do a local download and install on the computer that you want to remotely access, then you can access the computer outside of the office using their remote access app. The major benefit of this approach is that all of your data and files stay within your controlled IT environment.

Additional considerations from a cybersecurity and data breach risk management perspective:

• Be sure that whatever product you purchase can be centrally controlled by your IT department or service provider. This is so that if you have to terminate an employee you can also terminate their access to the remote access software. If you aren’t able to remove their access you’re very much as risk for a potentially disgruntled employee using the remote access as a back-door into your systems after termination—or even to steal files while still employed.
• If possible, try to use products that leverage existing usernames and passwords. We’re not saying to use the same username and passwords on these products, but to choose those that for example authenticate users by using their existing Office 365 of Google logins. If you aren’t able to do that, be sure to tell employees to use different passwords for these services to reduce the risk of a password compromise.
• Check the product setups and disable automatic recording of meetings. While this may seem like a convenient feature, it also is also presents data breach and e-discovery risks—especially if these recordings are sitting on an employee’s home computer that isn’t secured in the same way that your business devices are.
• Ensure that if home devices are going to be used for remote access that there are patched to the latest versions of operating systems, and also that they have active antivirus that also have current virus definitions. Even with the use of remote access software, keyloggers could still be captured by malware on the local computer to capture passwords and financial information.
• Use VPN only as a last resort. VPNs while quick to setup and easy to connect also potentially open up a tunnel between the home network and corporate network if not secured correctly. This means that any threats on the home network could travel over that tunnel into your corporate network.

Lastly, be careful of vendors trying to sell you products by leveraging your fears or contracts that provide product for free to start but then locking you into additional years of purchases. If you have any questions or want validation of which product(s) may be the best fit for your organization, please contact me at donny@intraprise.us.