The swiftness of the COVID-19 pandemic moving across America along with mandatory business lockdowns and “stay-at-home” orders have prompt a new normal for millions of people working remotely.

It is times like these where Magna5 gladly rolls up its sleeves to enable organizations to meet the demands of business disruption on a mass scale. Whether expanding existing remote capabilities or securing networks and endpoints from cyber threats, we answered the call across multiple verticals to lend a hand. Here are a few examples.

State Agency

Providing a cloud platform to help multiple agencies collaborate in answering high-volume calls for emergency relief benefits.

With implementation of the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act that provides emergency relief to workers who lost their jobs during the health crisis, a state employment office needed help in ramping up capabilities to handle the avalanche of unemployment benefits enrollment calls.

In this state, calls spiked to more than 100 calls per second (100,000 per day) when self-employed and independent contractors were added to those eligible for benefits. To assist with the call volume, the state agency brought in other departmental agencies and independent contact centers to provide support answering calls. They needed a means to centralize call traffic from the various agencies.

Magna5 was able to help the state agency route calls through Magna5’s cloud-based Contact Center-as-a-Service solution to enable the multiple agencies and contractors to log-in to the Magna5 platform and take calls regardless of their phone systems or network. Within five days, we deployed 600 agent seats with up to 1,800 queues (ratio of three calls in queue for every agent). In addition, Magna5 implemented an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) virtual audio assistant to direct callers who were on hold to the right services or information portals while they were waiting. When the call queues reached overflow capacity, a built-in recording would activate to allow callers to provide a callback number.

University

Fortifying campus network with multi-tiered security defense

With a majority of faculty and administration employees working remotely from home during the COVID-19 lockdown, one university saw a spike in phishing scams and spams. Employees were receiving emails supposedly from the university president providing staff members with gift cards as a thank you for staying healthy and remaining productive during the lockdown. The hacker was requesting they photograph the gift cards with the numbers exposed.

Magna5 worked with the university to implement a state-of-the-art spam filtering solution to filter out the malicious phishing emails. In addition, we implemented multi-factor authentication to bolster their Microsoft 365 accounts to ensure the right people were authorized in accessing their network.

Manufacturing, Architecture, Shipping & Logistics, Car Dealership and More

Providing managed security at the endpoint level to protect remote workers’ devices.

With “stay in place” orders requiring employees to work remotely, many organizations quickly realized their decentralized workforce needed added protection for their endpoint devices and applications. Unsecured endpoints are prime entry points for cybercriminals to target organizations. Without proper protection, it is open season for malicious ransomware and malware attacks through these unsecured endpoints.

The best approach is to be on the offense. Magna5 was able to help a wide range of organizations secure their networks and endpoints before destructive attacks took place. We deployed a fully managed Endpoint Security suite that unified prevention, detection and response in a single solution. With full visibility into their endpoint environments through Magna5’s cloud platform, we provided them with proactive patch management, real-time detection and response, policy-driven quarantine and active threat hunting.

Non-Profit Community Center

Enabling remote data backup and recovery in a secure cloud environment

An urban community center providing integrated housing, health and social services for people in a homeless or vulnerable at-risk crisis needed an urgent data backup solution. Their data center had become a COVID-19 hotspot with several employees testing positive. They still used tape backup, which means they normally had to physically drive to the data center, change-out backup tapes and deliver them back to the center. Now with the data center off limits due to possible contamination, they could not send people into the building to protect and back up their data. They needed a better solution where they could do it all remotely.

Magna5 rushed to their rescue with a cloud-based data backup solution. Moving several terabytes of data from 12 servers onto a cloud storage in a secure data center managed by Magna5, they now have the convenience of readily available data with easy access through an online portal. The remote transfer of data was completed in less than a day. They no longer have to deal with physically handling cumbersome tape libraries, drive time or costly tape inventories. The pandemic was a wake-up call to innovate their data backup capabilities for a time such as a national health crisis.

Need help with connectivity and security challenges with your remote workforce? We are here to help. Schedule a consultation with our experts.