About four weeks ago, one of our clients who shall remain anonymous called us in a panic. During the night, they had been burgled and four laptops which were key to the running of their business had been stolen.
Disaster! What should they do and how quickly could they get back up and running?
Well the good news is that they were on Office 365, so this means that effectively they could work from home and access all of their information from a browser. Crisis averted but there were a few very important issues that we needed to address as a matter of urgency.
From a security standpoint, what could we do with the data on these machines and could we delete any of it so that the data would remain secure? The unfortunate answer in this case was no. The PCs were originally set up by another supplier, had no encryption and had not installed any of the mobility solutions that would allow us to secure the devices or even run a remote wipe.
The good news is that, as all their data is stored in the cloud, their data was retrievable.
As an Ingram Micro Managed Partner, we were able to order 4 PCs for same day delivery. These were shipped to our offices, configured and sent out to the client with 24 hours. When setting up the new laptops, we enabled BitLocker as standard, which provides full drive encryption and data protection. BitLocker integrates with the operating system and addresses the threats of data theft or exposure from lost, stolen, or inappropriately decommissioned computers. And, we were happy to help!
The client was back up and running and better than before now safe in the knowledge that should the event reoccur the data would be encrypted and secure.
This, alongside staying up to date with your servers software is very important.
The EM+S suite from Microsoft contains a number of features which would allow for security to be in place for this exact eventuality. With Intune, if a device is lost or stolen then a remote wipe feature allows for complete peace of mind. This is certainly a lesson learned for this client!
If this is something you are interested in, please call us on 020 3819 3300 or email info@chalkline.tech.