Novel Coronavirus 2019 (COVID 19) has brought the world to a screeching halt since it made international headlines towards the end of January. The disease quickly spread across the globe in a matter of days.

At the end of the first quarter, enterprises around the world were forced to send employees home and find ways to support them in working remotely.

For some organisations working from home has been part of the culture and so they have been better able to adjust. Other organisations, unfortunately, neither have any experience working from home nor the right tools.

LogMeIn, one of the world’s leading providers of remote working and remote support solutions such as LogMeIn Pro, GotoMyPC, LogMeIn Central, GoToMeeting, Rescue, and GoToWebinar, is providing free subscriptions and support to teams looking to work from home for the first time as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

Along with supporting existing customers, the company is also providing free support to healthcare professionals, educational institutions, municipalities, and non-profit organisations.

“Starting immediately, we will be offering our critical front-line service providers with free, organisation-wide use of many LogMeIn products for 3 months through the availability of Emergency Remote Work Kits,” said LogMeIn President and CEO Bill Wagner.

LogMeIn serves some of the leading enterprises in industries such as academia, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and hence, has a portfolio of offerings which not only helps people work from home, but also takes care of their collaboration needs as well as the organisation’s cybersecurity concerns.

For those organisations looking to secure the business and the employee, LogMeIn’s LastPass Identity suite provides easy to use password management, Single Sign-On (SSO) and phone based multi-factor authentication (MFA) — capabilities which easily integrate into existing security platforms or that can be used as the foundation to protect remote workforce and partners, without getting in the way of productivity.

With the coronavirus forcing governments to call for businesses to shut shop, especially those not in essential sectors, only those with an effective business continuity plan, with tools from leading vendors such as LogMeIn, will be able to protect revenues and support customers in these trying times.

Given LogMeIn’s strong support for customers and businesses during the coronavirus outbreak, it is clear that the team believes that organisations will be safe if their people are safe.

With help from its suite of products, workers can make a seamless transition from the office desk to the kitchen table or home office, without friction caused by excessive security measures as a result of IT professionals being overcautious, or using existing tools in a way that they were not designed for.

In fact, without access to the office desk, it is unlikely that staff will even be able to continue what may have been suspect security practices, like the common tendency to pin passwords on drawing boards, stick PostIts with credentials behind keyboards, or worst of all, holler passwords across the room to share with colleagues and teammates!

With the right tools in place, working from home can be safer and can naturally boost compliance with best practices, while being supported by security policies. While this may be a busy time to adjust for employees and businesses alike, it may be the best time for supporting and empowering employees to be more secure, both in accessing business applications and while online.

Truth be told, while LogMeIn’s solution is now being offered for free to those that need it (for a limited time, during the coronavirus outbreak), the reality is that it is great for any organisation that has to quickly deploy a work-from-home policy that is both collaborative as well as secure.

LogMeIn’s suite with GoToMeeting, and GoToWebinar, among others, fosters collaboration, and LastPass makes security simple. Implementing the solutions is quick and easy too —which makes them a boon to IT teams that need to configure single sign on (SSO), MFA, and other security features for individual users before those employees can begin working from home. Plus, the security is silent because it is seamlessly built into the solutions.

Visit the LogMeIn website to find out more about the Emergency Remote Work Kits and read about the company, its ethos, and the different ways you can protect the people in the business, and therefore the business itself.