Stay productive and safe while working remotely during coronavirus pandemic

Office 365

Office 365 users have access to some of the best cloud-based collaboration tools, helping employees stay productive and secure from any location or device. As more teams transition from working collaboratively in an office environment to working remotely, the capabilities provided by Office 365 allow your business to continue to function as usual.

Taking the familiarity of classic programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to the cloud gives your team the ability to work collaboratively within a document, making changes and edits in real time. Office 365 also includes programs like:

• One Drive: for cloud-based storage solution
• Outlook: for email and scheduling
• Flow: for automating workflow and process
• Teams: for internal (and external) communication via chat, voice, and video

Offer: Microsoft is offering a free 6-month Office 365 E1 trial, which includes Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and Microsoft Office capabilities.

PC Matic

The two prominent approaches to keeping endpoints (computers, servers, laptops, tablets, etc.) safe from malware are blacklisting and whitelisting.

Legacy antivirus programs like TrendMicro, Norton, and McAffee, rely on teams of researchers to compile profiles and lists of known bad programs, code, etc. These known risks are then blacklisted and blocked from infecting your endpoints. A newer approach is to create whitelists of programs that are known to be good—and block anything that is unknown.

This approach leads to a 99%+ catch rate, as opposed to the blacklist rate of 60%. Providers have already built very large whitelists, but new “known good” programs are able to be quickly and easily added.

PC Matic is a leader in the whitelist approach to antivirus, having built its PC Matic Pro platform around whitelisting. The technology has been proven to provide real-time protection against ransomware, advanced persistent threats, and zero-day attacks to keep your endpoints secure.

For companies that would like their antivirus managed, Archetype SC offers a managed service to offload the work from your IT staff.

Offer: PC Matic is offering free cybersecurity protection through June 30 in response to the influx of remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Offer: Key pieces of the Okta Identity Cloud are being offered free, including Okta Single Sign-On (SSO) and Okta Multi-Factor Authentication. This offer gives all users protection for up to 5 apps for six months at no charge.  

Offer: IBM is offering MaaS360 at no charge for clients through June 15.

If your company hasn’t had the need to virtually meet and doesn’t have a preferred provider of those services, consider Microsoft Teams or GoToMeeting to keep your employees in touch with each other and clients.

Microsoft Teams

One of the most widely used messaging applications for businesses, Microsoft Teams is a program with features to keep your employees connected.

Features like video chatting, file sharing, and messaging allowed Microsoft Teams to add more daily active users the week of March 16th, 2020 than Slack has TOTAL, including a 500 percent increase in Teams meetings.

Teams was built with efficiencies in mind, as users can communicate, collaborate, and continue working from the desktop app or mobile version.

Offer: Microsoft is offering a free 6-month Office 365 E1 trial, which includes Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and Microsoft Office capabilities. Additionally, Microsoft is giving Teams access to non-licensed users through January 2021.

Offer: GoToMeeting has a free version that will allow users to perform basic tasks and organize meetings from sign up. Additionally, GoToMeeting is increasing its ability to offer customer support for remote employees.