Lee Neely – Security Professional, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lee Neely is a senior IT and security professional at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) with over 30 years of experience. He has been involved in many aspects of IT from system integration and quality testing to system and security architecture since 1986. He has had extensive experience with a wide variety of technology and applications from point implementations to enterprise solutions. Lee has worked with securing information systems since he installed his first firewall in 1989.
Chelle Clements – Web developer for Online Marketing and Publishing/OMP
Chelle touched her first computer in 1972 and has been fascinated with them ever since. She is an Army Veteran, one of the first women in the Corps of Engineers, and she has some great stories! She has an AAS in Envr Sci from NVCC (Northern VA), and a BS and an MS in Comp Sci from University of San Francisco. She spent 30-years at Lawrence Livermore Nat’l Lab as a researcher in three different fields (chemistry, physics and computer science). She currently supports several Veteran organizations with pro bono web development and until she relocated to Idaho served on the Livermore, CA art commission. Chelle’s ‘life-stretch’ since retirement is presenting and conducting cyber security workshops with her husband.
How I spent my Covid-19 Spring vacation or Extreme Telecommuting Security
With the C-19 pandemic we were all thrust into a new dynamic of remote work (you know – Work From Home!). This dynamic put people, systems, technology and processes to a test which they were not prepared or designed for.
The challenges of updating and adapting policy to accommodate a work force heretofore not working from home, ofttimes without a company issued laptop, to one where business was conducted using available platforms while continuing to properly protect information (both corporate and regulated), were unexpected and difficult to grasp. Clear communication of what was permitted where, intermixed with rapid assessment and associated acceptance of risks, kept us all jumping.
Unexpected complications arose from enlisting elements in the user’s home office which, while not permitted in policy, had to be re-evaluated for this modified situation. Even simple tasks, such as providing headsets to work with softphones and webinars were not only challenged by supply chain delays, but also by disabled computer interfaces. Additionally, employees not used to remote work needed handholding in unexpected ways.
I will cover: issues raised of moving to a 100% remote workforce almost overnight, solutions discovered and the constant reassessment of them, plans to prevent recurrence of issues discovered while supporting a larger (10x) overall remote work force, restart impacts as more essential services spin up, and resuming essential functions which cannot operate remotely.