Where were you at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic?
Some folks may recall spending 2020 making sourdough bread or DIY dalgona coffee. Others might still cringe when they remember how they always forgot to unmute when speaking on endless Zoom calls.
For IT professionals, the pandemic presented some once-in-a-lifetime challenges. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of people working remotely in the country tripled, from 9 million people to more than 27 million, according to data from the US Census Bureau. The wave of remote work threw many IT professionals into the Wild West, forcing them to fight off pesky Zoom bombers, rescue remote colleagues from forgotten passwords and outdated apps, and act as cybersecurity sheriff amidst a swarm of scammers trying to take advantage of remote work and health anxiety.
IT Brew caught up with several IT professionals to understand how they dealt with all these issues (and more!) during the early days of the pandemic.
March 2020. Between March 1 and May 31, 2020, 42 US states and territories issued stay-at-home orders, according to the CDC. Jesse Wolcott, who was an IT manager at hotel and casino entertainment company Caesars Entertainment during the pandemic’s early stages, told IT Brew he found out the Horseshoe Casino Baltimore would be closing just after he returned from a trip to Japan.
“We’re closing the casino…which is words that don’t go together,” Wolcott, now an assistant director of IT at Royal Farms, said.
The impromptu halt on the world came with a few benefits. For the next eight weeks, Wolcott walked through an empty casino, giving him the opportunity to tend to things he previously didn’t have the time to do.
“I’m walking around to my server room, blowing stuff out with compressed air, and taking the trash out, and cleaning up my server rooms,” Wolcott said. “And I’m like, ‘This is great. I’m finally getting all these things done.’”
Remote control. For Wolcott, assisting casino employees in a remote work environment wasn’t “too tragic of a transition,” given the fact that employees who needed to do remote work had already done so to some extent in the past and already had equipment. However, that task was top of mind for many IT workers whose colleagues weren’t familiar with working from their couches. Pedro Mendez, director of IT at dairy product manufacturer Tropical Cheese Industries during the pandemic, said one of the challenging parts of this adjustment was helping his colleagues learn new ways of using technology.
“Not too many people realize how technology plays such an important part [in] how our company operates or runs,” Mendez said. “Not too many people paid too much attention to that until that time.”
Mendez’s team of three supported roughly 350 employees, 200 of whom owned at least a couple of different work devices. Employees were sent home with computers that had TeamViewer installed in the event that they needed IT support, which Mendez said grew tenfold. In addition to the challenge of troubleshooting problems remotely, employees had to deal with additional variables such as poor internet connectivity.
“We had a very tight shift. We were always on call,” Mendez, now a director of IT at bedding manufacturer Pegasus Home Fashions, said, adding that he is very proud of what his team was able to accomplish.
When it came to IT/OT operations involving machinery, Mendez said the company and his team took precautions that would help employees do their jobs while remaining safe: “We started implementing gloves or trying to minimize the amount a computer will need to be shared by multiple people, things like that.” Tropical Cheese was able to operate for the entire pandemic, excluding one week when a few employees were sick.
David Torgerson, VP of technology and security at Lucid Software, which builds software products for visual brainstorming and diagramming, said the hypothetical scenario of Lucid employees needing to work remotely had always been discussed within the company. However, that hypothetical suddenly became real when Lucid’s CEO told Torgerson that the company’s employees would be sent home to work remotely…in the next 20 minutes.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re ready. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine,” said Torgerson, who was a senior director of DevOps at the time. “And then I ran to my team, saying, ‘Are we going to be fine? If not, we have to make it fine.’”
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Torgerson said the transition from in-person to remote at Lucid was smooth: Shifting the company from a free version of Zoom to the premium one was one of the biggest changes. However, fulfilling employees’ desire for connection proved a challenge.
The issue led Torgerson to leverage his technical role to foster more connections among the company’s workforce. In addition to leading an initiative that taught employees how to be “successful” while working remotely (tips involved taking showers as often as one would when commuting to the office), he helped his organization experiment with ways they could use their current application stack for virtual social events.
“We set up a rotation that was an opt-in of just connecting people randomly together, different departments, different teams, no agenda,” Torgerson said. “We just gave people time to just talk.”
“That intentional ability to help people feel recognized, feel seen, feel heard has made a huge difference,” Torgerson added.
Social distancing and social engineering, too. As employees juggled work and their personal lives from the comfort of their homes, malicious actors tried to take advantage of organizations as they navigated through unprecedented territory. Stratascale Field CISO Casey Corcoran said the pandemic accelerated the adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies to enable remote work during a time when endpoint detection and response was “scarce.”
Before 2020, Corcoran continued, organizations had mostly relied on resources like virus scanners. However, those tools weren’t as useful with workers falling back on their own PCs and phones.
“Your home computer may or may not have had any of that on it,” Corcoran said. “There was no way to understand what that machine had been exposed to [or] who was even using that machine.”
Corcoran added that shadow IT was another problem for companies as employees got creative with tools and services to help them with the remote-work version of day-to-day tasks and communications. For example, many employees began using their personal Dropbox to exchange important documents.
“People were just doing it,” Corcoran said. “They just set up a Dropbox…and then they put a corporate document up there and then send a link to somebody with very little visibility oversight on how that was being secured.”
Threat actors took advantage of these hiccups. There was a 78% increase in the number of ransomware attacks executed in March 2021 compared to the same period a year prior, when the pandemic was just beginning, according to BlackFog’s State of Ransomware in 2021 blog. The new standard of remote work also allowed for the rise of deepfake and fake IT worker schemes.
While the attack surface widened for a number of organizations, there were still some bright spots for the industry overall. Paul Bingham, SVP and executive dean of Western Governors University’s School of Information Technology, said the pandemic really outlined the importance of cybersecurity for both organizations and users.
“Everybody was now more cognizant of it, because they didn’t want some random dude showing up on their Zoom meeting or whatever,” Bingham said, referring to the advent of “Zoom bombings” during the pandemic era.
He added that the pandemic encouraged prospective cybersecurity professionals to clearly see the value of the career, including how it can be done remotely.
The new normal. Covid-19 also reshaped how some IT professionals lead in their roles. Wolcott, for instance, said the pandemic heightened his empathy for his team “up to 100” after watching some of his colleagues fall ill.
“You have this pit in your stomach of: What’s going to happen?” Wolcott said. “And it’s not because I’m going to have to rehire. It’s not because I have a gap at work. It’s because this is a person who I spend a lot of time with and I care about.”
Mendez said the pandemic taught him that everyone is capable of learning how to work remotely. He also feels more confident about helping his current organization navigate another catastrophe.
“Most of the IT professionals that have gone through the pandemic, I’m pretty sure we all know what to do better, or how to do it better, because of both the experiences that we had and [because] technology nowadays is so much more reliable.”