How MSPs can protect remote employees during the COVID-19 pandemic

With the growing concern over the spread of coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, there are a growing number of school closures and companies are encouraging employees to work from home when possible. Bloomberg cited that approximately 29 percent of the 42 million Americans in the workforce are able to work from home. This creates a new cybersecurity challenge for managed service providers (MSPs).

With more employees working from home, that means more managed devices are connecting remotely, away from the secured network. How can MSPs ensure that the devices are up-to-date with the latest security patches and have the latest antivirus definition? Cybercriminals are leveraging COVID-19 as a buzzword to spread malware, and to protect users from visiting threat-embedded websites, so now is the time to give this some thought.

Tips for protecting remote workers

Barracuda MSP offers security solutions that can help MSPs easily protect remote users.

For example, with Barracuda Managed Workplace, MSPs can manage all remote devices through a central dashboard, along with network devices. Beyond that, it also offers MSPs the ability to:

• Monitor remote devices for any anomalies that may indicate a cyber threat


• Apply security patches as they become available


• Deploy, monitor, and manage antivirus


• Remotely connect to clients’ machines to promptly support and resolve any issues

Reports of cybercriminals using COVID-19 in online scams have surfaced recently, as well.

Posing as World Health Organization (WHO) personnel, it attempts to scam individuals and companies, stealing information and money. Employee education is required to ensure that they do not provide personal information to unknown sites. It is worth reminding customers that the WHO has stated that they will never ask for login information, send unrequested email attachments, direct users to a link outside of www.who.int, or to donate directly to emergency response plans or funding appeals.

MSPs will also want to protect onsite and remote users from these malicious sites, inappropriate content, and file-based threats, which they can do with Barracuda Content Shield, a cloud managed and provisioned web security solution with robust content filtering. MSPs can deploy and configure Barracuda Content Shield in less than 15 minutes with its LDAP and Azure AD integration. It is integrated with Barracuda Managed Workplace, making it easy to protect remote users from web-borne cyberthreats.

In addition, to protect remote devices’ data and eliminate downtime for remote users in case of data loss, a software-only backup and disaster recovery solution with secure hybrid local and cloud backup services will be helpful. For example, Barracuda Intronis Backup makes it easy for MSPs to protect remote devices’ data and eliminate downtime for remote users in case of data loss.

Both Content Shield and Intronis Backup are now integrated with Managed Workplace, giving MSPs a single-pane-of-glass deployment and monitoring capability for ease of management.

Barracuda MSP is here to help MSPs and their SMB customers as workforce demands change. To learn more about how Barracuda Managed Workplace can help you protect your customers’ growing work-from-home workforce, visit the links above. We also host a Weekly RMM Demo and Discussion, where you can ask your questions on this topic and learn more about how to factor security into your every day practices with Managed Workplace and our other portfolio solutions.

Request a free trial of Managed Workplace RMM