Faced with the urgency of the COVID crisis, many companies and administrations have multiplied the tools and rushed to the best known solutions, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Once the emergency is over, a simple observation: too many tools, too many emails, too many web conferences, too much information, files scattered everywhere... in short, impossible to follow!
This generalization of teleworking has forced us to change our habits and learn to juggle a large number of applications and procedures, such as the VPN, to be able to check our email or access the file server. How to provide the necessary tools for collaborative work, while avoiding "burnout"? What are the solutions for teleworking while limiting the risk of data security? Two questions to Christopher Potter, Founder and President of CEO-Vision and former CIO of the Crédit Agricole Group.
The challenges of teleworking standardization
Collaboration has long been synonymous with an attachment or task requests sent by email. With several hundred emails a day and documents in all directions, it is essential to change our habits to be effective.
Teleworking involves various constraints related to access to tools, documents, tasks and colleagues. However, this is not enough, because "teleworking" means "how to incorporate collaborative work with this mass of information and remote teams?". Implementing teleworking without asking the right questions can have significant consequences: partial shutdowns, mistakes, managers on the brink of collapse, loss of productivity, lack of team cohesion and the key to HR conflicts… not to mention the newcomers who have no chance of integrating in these conditions.
The other aspect, and not the least, is the security of outside access to the Information System. We talk a lot about security in the face of the multiplication of cyberattacks, especially the obsolete file server, but this is far from being the only risk. As we like to say in the industry, the biggest security hole is “what lies between the chair and the keyboard”. Without blaming users, remember that IT Departments must offer solutions that limit the risk of human error. For example, getting the wrong recipient when sending a document with personal data or having access to all the data under the pretext that you are a "technical administrator". Finally, it is also necessary to take into account the regulatory framework, with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the Cloud Act, an extraterritorial law that authorizes the US government to requisition data under certain conditions, regardless of its location.
5 essential principles to guide the implementation of teleworking
Centralize the data: First of all, it is important to be able to manage documents and related information in a single database. In other words, avoid scattering them between a file server, computer, tablet, cloud folders, email, etc.
End application collection: Rather than multiplying the tools and ending up with an "application library", you need to set up a unified solution. For example, when you are in front of your task list, you must be able to display the linked documents in one click, or when you have to edit a document, you must be able to easily view the associated messages. If the various tools are not integrated with each other, users no longer know where to find or where to share information.
Make sure you always have access to up-to-date information: A difficult goal to achieve, but not impossible when there are no more duplicate files and you have the history of modifications. Thus, when we access a document, we know if it is obsolete or not. This means you can share the same file between various managers without "copying and pasting" it, or sending it as an attachment.
Train the best practices: Even with the best tool in the world, you can miss your digital transformation! It is not enough to have an easy-to-use solution and useful features. It is essential to support the change that this generates by helping the managers to organize their collaborative document management, according to their business requirements, as well as to promote the best practices.
Secure the data: To know where your data is stored and ensure its confidentiality, we recommend opting for a sovereign solution, hosted OnPremise (its Datacenter) or using a hosting without American activities. Knowing how the software works is also an important element, made possible with Open Source technology (royalty-free license, possible audit of the source code). Sovereignty and Open Source are strongly recommended and sometimes even imposed on administrations, in particular Ministries which are prohibited from storing their data in the cloud under the Cloud Act, such as Microsoft's Office365-Teams offers (cf. The circular "Cloud au Centre - 6282/SG" of the Prime Minister). Then, you have to avoid "user roles" which give access to the entire documentary base (as a reminder, the "Snowden" scandal) and finally, benefit from a security monitoring service and ensure that the software is up to date in order to avoid exploiting known vulnerabilities.
How does CEO-Vision achieve its goals with the GoFAST Digital Workplace solution?
Despite what some people think, there are many relevant French alternatives to GAFAM! Among these sovereign solutions, CEO-Vision's GoFAST Digital Workplace stands out as an Open Source solution competing with the Office365-SharePoint-Teams offer.
It is not "a collection of apps ", but a single workspace with the Document Management System (DMS), digitalization of processes and paper documents, office co-editing, search engine, instant messaging and web conferencing. Thus, GoFAST makes it possible to truly federate collaborative work from the document template to the eIDAS e-signature, but also to replace the obsolete file server in order to achieve such objectives as zero duplicates, zero attachments, zero version errors and zero lost information.
Intended for administrations, local authorities, higher education, as well as SMEs, midcaps and large groups, GoFAST is part of the "Cloud Plan" initiated by the government: not subject to extraterritorial laws, Open Source with open standards guaranteeing durability and reversibility, hosted OnPremise or in dedicated SaaS (each organization has its own platform and knows where its data is) and even, in SaaS SecNumCloud at 3DS Outscale by Dassault Systèmes (qualified as "Trusted Cloud").
In order to go beyond the "Cloud Plan" and meet the expectations of users, General Management and CIOs, CEO-Vision integrates into its service offer: security monitoring with regular intrusion tests, application supervision, all updates and strong responsiveness to security fixes, with its support and R&D located in France.