Helping With Security Concerns When Working From Home

If you’re like a lot of companies and staff of late, at least some of your employees will be working from home. That’s all well and good, but what are they using at home to do this work and do you know if that device (or those devices) are secure? Are they running Antivirus? Do they have up-to-date Office software? Are their operating system updates complete? How do you know if you don’t have your management client on their computers? 

Open-AudIT comes to the rescue! Sign up for an Open-AudIT Cloud account and it’s quick and easy to find out exactly what your staff’s devices consist of.

Go to http://opmantek.com/cloud, sign up, sign in and use the Audit My PC functionality. You can copy the provided URL and email it to your staff, advising them to download and run the audit script. The audit script will automatically send the result back to Open-AudIT Cloud, which will update your instance.

Alternatively if you’re running Open-AudIT on premise, simply send the URL of the Open-AudIT homepage (http://your-server/omk/open-audit) to your users. There is an option to Audit My PC right there, see image below.

But wait, there’s more! 

What if you have requirements that users have Antivirus installed, well there’s already a query for that inbuilt. It’s the same for Office software, we already have a query. But what if you would like to take things one step further – that’s where our Baselines feature comes in. You define a list of software and versions that PCs must meet (or exceed), assign the VPN users PCs to a Group and run the Baseline against that Group. You’ll see an easily digestible report showing the status of each PC and the test run against it.

And what about tracking any computers that would normally be in the office, but are taken home? Again, it’s just as easy. Make sure you have an entry in Open-AudIT for the PC in question, then just edit the Owner field on the device details page to indicate that user X now has PC Y. When they bring it back, remove the name. If that’s too simple, you can always create custom fields such as “lent to”, “lent on” and “returned on”. You can easily query which PCs are still out on loan to staff working from home. Now you also know who has what and what configuration the machines have.

You now know the configuration of the computers of your staff using your VPN to continue working. You are able to report on those PCs and show any that don’t meet your corporate security standards, and you have a record of any PCs that have left the workplace. This is a simple way Open-AudIT can help you manage your device fleet, but at this time we thought it was important to let you know.