Securing Co-Working Spaces: How Deep Freeze Cloud Enhances Shared Workstation Management

When future history professors look back on the 2020s, they will have a lot of course material to assign their students. But what will those future generations think of when they consider our current decade? Regarding how people work, this decade will probably be remembered for how the Covid-19 pandemic upturned our work settings.

In terms of importance, perhaps only artificial intelligence and whatever consequences it brings in the next five years can rival the slew of changes we’ve seen to work culture this decade. Of course, there were several social and economic factors that were already changing how we work before 2020, but one cannot overstate the impact of remote work since then. 

In the discussion of back-to-office orders, remote working and hybrid work schedules, what sometimes gets lost is the co-working space. But these setups remain quite popular, and while they bring numerous advantages, they also throw up some challenges. This is particularly true as regards workstation security and consistency.

What Is a Co-Working Space?

Entrepreneur Brad Neuberg coined the term “co-working” to denote a shared office environment 20 years ago. This meaning of co-working indicates the use of collaborative workspaces that provide an alternative way to work. Traditionally, an office or workplace features employees of an organization working near each other, but they may be in their own offices or cubicles — with their own dedicated workstations. 

In co-working spaces, people can work independently or in groups to complete projects. Co-working can foster a strong sense of community and provide a more conducive and productive working atmosphere. A co-working space provides the amenities workers need to perform their duties. These include Wi-Fi, furniture, printers, scanners and, perhaps most importantly, coffee. 

Indeed, these settings often resemble a modern café more than a traditional office. Freelancers and remote workers have long used cafés as their own personal workspaces, so it makes sense that businesses have mimicked this trend. And, like cafés, not everyone in a co-working space necessarily works for the same company.

While some co-working spaces are collaborative, open-concept rooms businesses use instead of traditional offices, they can also be spaces that numerous individuals or organizations rent out. These spaces are shared work environments that feature individuals or teams from different companies. These people can work independently or collaboratively. Some might be spaces for workers in specific sectors, while others welcome anybody to rent the space.

Are Co-Working Spaces Hard To Manage?

It depends on the type of co-working space and who’s involved, but it’s undeniable that these work setups come with some inherent challenges. One that’s pretty self-evident is the cybersecurity complexities such a space involves. Here are some of the top cybersecurity and IT challenges of co-working spaces:

• Shared hardware: If one person uses a device — printer, scanner, laptop, etc. — then only one person is responsible for that device’s security. But with numerous people using that device, any one of them might make an unauthorized change or engage in risky behavior as regards cybersecurity.
• Shared Wi-Fi: Network vulnerabilities are a major concern of co-working spaces. If a corrupted device accesses the network, this can affect all other devices. Malware, ransomware and phishing scams are significant worries for co-working.
• Bring your own device policies: Many co-workers bring their own devices to their spaces. This means a threat incident doesn’t even have to occur on the shared network. Somebody can just bring their previously corrupted device into the space and jeopardize the safety of all the other devices.
• The cloud: Cloud security validation is crucial in co-working environments. It’s difficult for these spaces to succeed without cloud computing, but robust security measures are necessary to protect data and comply with standards.

How Deep Freeze Cloud Can Help

Faronics developed Deep Freeze to help numerous types of organizations with numerous types of work setups. This includes co-working. Here’s how Deep Freeze can provide security to co-working spaces and simplify workstation management:

• Reboot To Restore: This Deep Freeze feature is as powerful as it is simple. It enables you to reset co-working workstations to a predetermined setting every time you restart the device. This means, no matter who was using the computer or what they were doing, as soon as you turn it off and back on again, it’s the same as it ever was.
• Management console: Deep Freeze Cloud makes it easy to deploy, configure and manage workstations from a single interface.
• ThawSpace: You can create virtual partitions to retain important data even if there is no separate physical partition available on the computer.
• Automatic updates: Workstations can automatically download Windows updates — even when the computers are frozen. 
• Maintenance: You can schedule different maintenance periods to perform automatic updates using a batch file or a third-party management solution.

To learn more about how Deep Freeze can increase security and facilitate workstation management in co-working spaces, please reach out to our experts today.