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IT Brew

Tom McKay

itbrew.com

A person sits alone at a desk in a deserted, dimly-lit office.

Office occupancy in major markets dropped to 10% in March 2020. By mid-September 2022, it was back to just 47%.

Remote work contributing to ‘office real estate apocalypse’

Billy Hurley

woman leaning on laptop while moving into new home

IT pros share advice on how to ensure a new employee has a smooth day 1 (from home)

Five remote-onboarding tips for IT pros

As employees kinda sorta return to their cubicles, they’ll bring with them more than just their backpacks from 2020. Workers are returning with security setups from the work-from-home era.

Work-from-home security practices arrive at the office

Remote work

Brianna Monsanto

In 2011, Prakash Arunkundrum took a trip to the Logitech office for a videoconference meeting with a participant in another part of the world. Today, the task may seem mundane, but back then, getting on a videoconference call could feel like something it took a village to do.

“Either the bandwidth won’t work, or you wouldn’t know which button to press, or you had a bunch of controllers and you didn’t know which controllers to use,” Arunkundrum said, adding that he ultimately waved his white flag and called for IT help the day of his videocall.

Arunkundrum, now president of Logitech for Business (LOB), Logitech’s enterprise solutions arm, said things are much different now, partly because of the company’s early efforts to simplify workplace technology.

Since 2011, LOB, formerly known as Logitech Video Collaboration, has had big dreams for enhancing videoconference communication. The BCC950 ConferenceCam, one of the first products in LOB’s lineup, aimed to deliver high-quality audio and video through an easy-to-use interface. The device propelled Logitech—which Arunkundrum said was once known predominantly as a “mouse company”—into the unified communications category.

Those bets paid off. Today, one in three meeting rooms and desk solutions use Logitech’s workplace tech, according to data shared by the company.

“We are in finance. We are in boardrooms. We are in startups. We are at your coffee shop,” Arunkundrum said.

Logitech’s early foresight helped propel it to become a leader in enterprise technology as the pandemic transformed workplace norms.

Prior to Logitech’s enterprise product line taking off, Moor Insights & Strategy VP and Principal Analyst Melody Brue said Logitech was known for its selection of computer peripherals.

“They’re known for their keyboards, their webcams, headsets, conferencing systems, and then more consumer gaming accessories,” Brue said.

Arunkundrum said Logitech had wanted to simplify conference room tech, which he noted was “super complex” in the early 2010s. While the BCC950 was the business group’s first product, Arunkundrum called Logitech MeetUp, an all-in-one conference camera device first released in 2017, LOB’s “breakthrough” product because of how it simplified the conference experience.

“We’ve sold over a million units of those over the years, and it’s the fastest-growing meeting room category,” Arunkundrum said. “So, we essentially super-simplified that whole experience.”

 And then, just like that, Covid-19 happened.

When the pandemic hit and forced many workers to adopt hybrid and remote working styles, Arunkundrum said demand for Logitech products surged, both on the video collaboration side and the personal workspace front.

“I’d say there was a Goldilocks moment where some of our foresight actually got fast-forwarded because of Covid,” he said. Webcams on Logitech’s website quickly sold out “due to high demand” during the peak of the pandemic.

 announcing the tech company’s Q4 financial results for the 2021 fiscal year, former Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell said the company had its best year yet. Logitech brought in $5.25 billion in sales that year, an unprecedented amount for the company.

“Our powerful and resilient capabilities allowed us to both deliver remarkable performance in a challenging FY 2021, and at the same time, invest in compelling plans for the future,” Darrell, who departed Logitech in 2023, said at the time. “The world has just caught a glimpse of what Logitech will become.”

The company’s growing traction didn’t end there. Crawford Del Prete, president of IDC, said the pandemic’s lasting impact on the office continued to aid Logitech’s success.

“We’ve all read the stories of the companies that say everybody’s got to come back,” Del Prete said. “Well, the reality is people now work from both places, and because they work from both places, that’s been a tailwind to Logitech’s business.”

Arunkundrum said LOB currently makes up 40% of Logitech’s overall revenue. While the pandemic may now be a not-so distant memory, the business group still has big plans for workplace tech.

In January, the tech company announced Logitech Spot, an office sensor capable of tracking a room’s stats like occupancy, temperature, and humidity in order to make automated changes (e.g., automatically making a room available to book for meetings if its current meeting ends early). In the same month, Logitech also announced Rally Board 65, an “all-in-one portable videoconference solution” that quickly equips the room or small space it occupies with the tools needed for a collaborative conference room.

Arunkundrum said LOB is focused on solutions that enhance the workplace experience as the IT professional role increasingly evolves to support the needs of employees and their workplace environment.

“Facilities, IT, and HR are working closer together than I’ve ever seen, and I think this is certainly something that we are helping equip as part of our technology,” he said.

Del Prete said the new era of products reflects Logitech’s ability to pivot its focus to new areas and innovations.

“They see these opportunities and they move to them and then that becomes a category expander for them,” Del Prete said. “And I think that’s really one of the marvelous features about the company.”

Zoom in of a web camera with a mouse arrow pointing towards it.

How Logitech’s foresight on workplace conferencing paid off 

“We are in finance. We are in boardrooms. We are in startups. We are at your coffee shop,” Logitech for Business President Prakash Arunkundrum says.

Like the agent of a one-hit wonder pop star, many employers around the nation are pushing their employees to make a comeback…except this one is back to the office.

The big return-to-office (RTO) push appears here to stay for an increasing number of employers. According to a 

 querying 849 US managers in January, 27% of companies expect to enforce a five-day in-office workweek by the end of 2025.

But this trend requires more than just free food and other perks to coax employees into making a return.

Ivanti CSO Daniel Spicer told IT Brew that IT professionals have a key role to play in ensuring a good employee experience in a company’s RTO strategy. He said friction in the employee experience post-return can lead to employees using 

“You actually end up with more security threats, from my vantage point, when there isn’t a good employee experience because then they’re trying to figure out, ‘How do I get my job done in the face of all these challenges?’” Spicer said. “And that normally involves pulling in a bunch of other tools or using technology that isn’t approved by the company.”

Aaron Warner, founder and CEO of cybersecurity consulting firm ProCircular, said that IT professionals expecting an increase in office attendance from once remote and hybrid employees may find that returning devices have 

, unpatched software, or are out of date. He suggested that the transition is a good time to review the standard build or the expected configuration for company devices.

“Get a good, clean image for every workstation you want in your company, and start with the computers that are coming back,” Warner said, adding that it may be a good time to invest in 

Warner suggested that IT professionals should also consider revamping core policies around mobile device management, acceptable use, and privacy.

“If your policy document reads like stereo instructions, it’s probably a good time to rewrite that thing so that somebody knows that it’s important and it’s a good place to set expectations or reset expectations,” Warner said.

He added that there is value in communicating to employees their role in protecting their company from threats.

“From a security perspective, the most valuable insights you will get into your own cybersecurity come from those employees,” Warner said. “So, the better you’re able to build trust across that environment, the more you’re going to know about what’s happening inside of that environment.”

Some IT professionals currently going through the RTO transition said things may be a little different than before. Cory Rice, VP of IT at KnowBe4, said his company has reintroduced a hybrid and full-time work model for some of its employees. These days, Rice spends his time making sure employees have headsets to address noise complaints and dealing with forgotten or lost equipment.

“Now you’re back to people bringing things back and forth,” Rice said. “So, 10 people forget their chargers a day, 10 people forget their headsets a day, people just forget their computers and leave those at home.”

He said the shift back to in-person work has come with some perks, however, such as better help desk etiquette.

“Everybody got used to putting in tickets,” Rice said. “So, even when they’re in the office, rather than walk down and say, ‘I want to bother the help desk,’ they log a ticket, which has actually been a really nice change that happened.”

Disagreement over remote work return to office

Your office is requiring people to return to in-person work. Now what?

IT pros should consider reevaluating core policies around mobile device management and acceptable use of company devices, says one cybersecurity CEO. 

Months after Dell warned most of its remote workers that they needed to return to office (RTO) or 

, about half of its workforce has chosen the consequences.

In February, Dell mandated that remote staff choose between reclassifying themselves as hybrid—which requires a minimum of three days per week in office—or lose their eligibility for promotions and role changes. Dell management then implemented a color-coded 

Even that push apparently wasn’t enough to get many Dell personnel back into the office. Business Insider, citing “internal data on the entire full-time workforce,” 

 of the company’s US employees have chosen to remain remote. Among international staff, the percentage was around a third.

“My team is spread out around the world,” one worker told BI. “Almost 90% of the team did the same as in our case there was no real advantage going to the office.”

In some cases, employees chose not to come in because Dell had closed nearby offices, or so few colleagues were in their area that they saw no benefit from coming in. Dell workers also told the news site that there were few promotion opportunities. The company has 

A Dell spokesperson responded to the claims in a 

 that around 75% of global staff and nearly 70% of US staff "who live near a major Dell office" had chosen hybrid status. (The same statement was also forwarded to IT Brew after a request for comment.)

While evidence as to whether remote workers are more or less productive is 

, research has found that many workers would 

 than return to the office (in part due to factors like the 

 earlier this year suggesting RTO mandates not only don’t improve business performance, but help management at ailing firms scapegoat workers.

Stanford economist Nick Bloom, one of the academics behind 

, has argued that RTO mandates hit a plateau at the end of 2022 and won’t make a comeback, because being more flexible allows businesses to save on hiring and turnover.

“Fully remote is also hugely profitable, even if it’s negative on productivity,” Bloom 

One Dell worker told Business Insider that many of his colleagues are searching for new jobs.

“Being a second-class citizen doesn’t leave you any career opportunities,” he said.

Almost 50% of Dell’s US workforce said no to RTO mandate: report

Dell’s RTO mandate has failed to convince much of its workforce to come into facilities.

Eoin Higgins

You may want to grab a bag of popcorn to go with that all-hands video call. Cisco and Zoom have both unveiled AI-driven “cinematic meeting” technologies intended to make work gatherings more entertaining. It may not feel exactly like going to the movies, but at least it won’t feel like a timeshare presentation.

 feature has already rolled out to users in beta; Cisco’s RoomOS 

 tool is expected in December. The cinematic meetings are intended to keep people’s attention with changing angles and perspectives.

Both the Zoom and Cisco products can be seen as a reaction to the new realities of hybrid work made commonplace by the pandemic.

“As more and more people have gone into the office, we have more and more situations where it’s no longer the nice 

 layout—everybody in their own window,” Technalysis analyst Bob O’Donnell 

 TechTarget. “There’s the big room, and that room experience is not good.”

Fletcher Previn, Cisco’s CIO and someone with a bit of experience in 

, told IT Brew that a two-hour meeting leaves people tired, while a two-hour movie tends not to.

“Why is it that a meeting is so much more mentally taxing?” Previn said. “One of the reasons is a completely static view of somebody for two hours; it’s not the way your brain actually normally processes a thing.”

A demo shown to the conference audience at Cisco Live in early June previewed meetings where the technology would follow speakers with facial and audio recognition. Zoom’s technology does not use facial recognition.

Cisco EVP and General Manager of Security and Collaboration Business Units Jeetu Patel said his company’s meeting tool provides “a movie-like experience.” Putting that ideal into practice, however, will take hard work.

“This requires hardware devices across multiple locations that have GPUs that are of a certain capacity that can do computing; we’ve actually done some work to have sound and acoustics intelligence along with video intelligence tied together and have the right algorithms,” Patel said. “that’s hard stuff; it’s not easy, it’s computer science problems.”

Tech departments won’t have to worry about managing the meetings, Patel assured IT Brew. The AI is designed to handle video and audio decisions. All the IT side will have to do is get the app up and running for users.

“One of the things we tried to do with AI was build a ton of features that are invisible, because what you don’t want to do is increase the cognitive load for people,” Patel said.

Ticket booth with Zoom call instead of teller

No more ‘Hollywood Squares’ work meetings—Cisco and Zoom are going cinematic

The idea is “a movie-like experience where there’s this level of dynamism in the way that people are engaging with each other,” one Cisco exec tells IT Brew.

Executives are working from home but their cybersecurity practices are OOO, 

 from the research center Ponemon Institute and privacy-protection company BlackCloak that found that a large portion of C-suiters aren’t performing important protection practices while working remotely.

The lack of WFH safeguards—patch management, VPN usage, and two-factor authentication, to name a few—demonstrates weaknesses that attackers are especially happy to find given the value of their targets, who might be moving from the office to the couch.

“The issues of remote work and executives aren't an order of multitude; it's an order of magnitude,” said Lodrina Cherne, certified instructor for the SANS Institute in the digital forensics track.

In the May survey of 553 IT and IT security practitioners, 42% of respondents reported cyberattacks on key executives or their family members. Such cyberattacks against execs resulted in the theft of sensitive financial data, intellectual property, and company information.

And the consequences of a CEO-targeted attack can go beyond the executive.

“When you start talking about corporate attack surface, you start talking about shareholder confidence. This is where the idea of magnitude comes in, and all of the ripple effects,” said Cherne.

Other data points from the survey revealed a lack of remote readiness:

“As security improves within organizations, cybercriminals are increasingly targeting individuals' private lives by attacking home networks and compromising unsecured devices with malware and ransomware,” read the report, citing tactics like doxxing, malware, infections, personal email attacks, and online impersonation.

The report revealed a lack of visibility into personal devices (74% of respondents), executives’ personal email accounts (66%), the executives’ home networks to prevent cyberattacks (64%), and password hygiene (57%).

Many steps to secure the home environment were affirmed by less than half of those surveyed. Of the respondents, 47% admitted to using a VPN application on every personal device; 45% noted two-factor authentication; and 51% said they used password managers.	

To avoid falling for someone impersonating a 

, switch to a different communications channel when sensitive information is being transferred—move from email to phone, perhaps, or from text message to an end-to-end encrypted channel like Signal, said Cherne, who also urged remote staff to confirm the identity of potential phishers with a few thoughtful questions:

“What was it that we had for dinner at the holidays last year, you know? Is that the last time I saw you? So it could be something as simple as validating information that only the asker would know,” Cherne told IT Brew.

For an IT staff, Sue Bergamo, CIO and CISO at the cybersecurity consultancy BTE Partners, is big on company-sponsored laptops. “Because I can control the antivirus software, that endpoint detection… I can also make sure that you have a VPN.”

Jen Miller-Osborn, former director of threat intelligence for Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks, and Tony Hughes, director of cyber security and technology risk consulting at ANSEC IA, recommend patching and configuring routers to segment networks and set login access rules.

“Your own home router is not owned by the corporation. It's effectively a bring your own device. You have to enforce some rules on to that,” said Hughes.

A multitude of rules to fight a magnitude of trouble.

Taking cybersecurity home: Practices for remote work

WFH execs can mean MIA cybersecurity

Tech job postings roared back in March—and so did offers of remote work.

Open tech jobs jumped by 197,000 for March, according to CompTIA’s 

With the spike in open jobs has come a corresponding jump in the number of positions offered out of office. Total open positions currently stand at 316,000, with one in five classified as remote or hybrid, according to CompTIA’s Steven Ostrowski.

The move to remote jobs is a sign of both the need on the part of employers to entice prospective employees, and the broader shift in the IT office.

Ask Actalent’s Jason DeKoster about the bump in remote work and he’ll point to a number of factors—all revolving around the need to get talent to buy into the workplace. Insisting on an in-office culture could restrict the pool of available workers, and when remote positions aren’t prohibitive, there’s little reason not to offer them to expand the labor possibilities past the realm of local staffers.

DeKoster, who is managing director of strategic recruitment at the firm, breaks seeking out talent into three parts: attraction, retention, and engagement. Offering remote and hybrid work to prospective employees helps with these three aspects by providing them with the convenience to compete for their services.

“In order to get access to as much tech talent, IT talent, engineering talent, scientific talent, companies are changing their openness” to remote work, DeKoster said.

CompTIA chief research officer Tim Herbert told IT Brew that he thinks the number of remote positions is actually undercounted because it only targets the postings that specifically mention remote work. But that discounts the employers who may offer hybrid solutions later in the hiring process.

“They are offering remote work for three days [or] two days in the office, but that usually is often teased out once they have a candidate that they’re actually looking to hire,” Herbert said.

Herbert did caution readers not to look too deeply into the remote work spike, at least not yet.

“This is always tough,” Herbert said. “We never want to read too much into any one month; we’ll have to see how things play out.”

a red remote, yellow remote, and orange remote in someone's hand on a blue background

Remote work tech job postings jumped in March, a sign that RTO probably isn’t coming anytime soon

Experts advise not to look too deeply into a single month’s numbers, but the jump is substantial.

Careful: The “Geek Squad” may just be a bunch of bullies.

 from CISA noted that federal employees have been targeted with bogus emails from the help desk. Along with the crafty phishing email, this new take on tech support scams entices users to download a legitimate and favorite IT support tool: remote monitoring and management (RMM).

With attackers intent on finding ways to remote-in, companies that use RMM software, like many managed service providers (MSPs), are high-value targets, and IT pros must be especially cautious about ways to restrict and monitor the products’ use.

“The guys who are answering the email are the same people that are logging in and supporting customers, so if I get your credentials…now I can pivot into the entire customer base,” said Brian Haugli, CEO at the cybersecurity services company SideChannel.

In October 2022, CISA identified a “widespread cyber campaign involving the malicious use of legitimate RMM software,” which began with a phishing email that said: 

Your subscription with GEEK SQUAD will Renew Today and $399.99 is about to be Debited from your account by Today.

Since at least June 2022, cyber-criminal actors have sent help-desk-themed phishing emails to federal staff’s personal and government email addresses, according to the advisory. In a successful execution of the attack, a target end-user would call a number in the email, where the threat actor would convince the victim to download RMM software.

When an attacker gains remote access, options abound. Helpful for the help desk, the RMM platform is just as friendly for hackers, allowing reconnaissance across the managed devices.

With access to the system, an attacker can download keyloggers or malware. One tactic revealed in the advisory even involved changing a browser’s bank account page to convince a target to send back “refunds” for the false, doctored overpayment.

“This all occurs within the actual phone call,” said Crane Hassold, director of threat intelligence at the email-security company Abnormal Security.A remote management tool like AnyDesk and ConnectWise (formerly ScreenConnect) is a particularly enticing gift if they can get one used by MSPs, who get paid to solve problems for their remote clients.

The advisory noted that targets can include MSPs and IT help desks, who regularly use legitimate RMM software for technical and security end-user support.

There are ways to watch and restrict rogue RMM usage. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools can enforce the use of company-sanctioned RMM devices. RMM tools can be integrated into a team’s security incident and event management (SIEM) to detect anomalies like suspicious logins from suspicious locations. 

 can add layers of protection against any Geek-y imposters.

Such practices are important for companies to have and outsourced security providers to demonstrate, said Haugli.

“Managed service providers and IT providers should be going out of their way to prove that they can be trusted, and should be the ones providing these services,” Haugli told IT Brew.

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email bill@morningbrew.com.