Stay Secure While Working Remotely Using these 6 Best Practices
While drinking coffee in pajamas, working remotely from home is definitely a good way of life. Indeed, more and more companies are beginning to adopt this way of working.
Why not?
Workers can work from home, arrange their own schedules and save a lot of daily commuting, while companies can reduce infrastructure costs by using the material and software resources of the labor force.
Why should you invest when your employees already own expensive products? Of course, this is easier in theory than in practice. Since you can’t understand how much your employees value security, you can open the digital Pandora’s box by letting them process your business data without taking the necessary security measures. If the company wants to operate in a borderless world, it is clear that the company needs to inform security best practices.
Since remote work is no longer the privilege of a few people, large and small businesses have no choice but to adopt it, otherwise they risk losing their competitors. The challenges of working from home are equally difficult. The 2018 Remote Worker Security Survey from iPass found that 52% of companies in the United States worry that their employees have been victims of hackers in the past 12 months. 67% believe that most attacks occur from Wifi wireless networks to coffee shops.
Since working from home is the future, there should be best safety practices. Below we will analyze the most basic.
Create a remote work strategy
In addition to clearly identifying how remote workers behave while working from home, the remote work strategy should also list the tools that they are allowed to use for remote work. Companies should list the tools they use in the organization to ensure effective data distribution. Remote team members should also use a secure Internet connection to access company data and avoid using public Wi-Fi.
The remote work policy should include elements such as temporary and permanent work, reasons for allowing home work (such as parental benefits, severe weather, emergency situations, geographic distance, etc.), and best home safety practices.
Get a (really) strong password policy
As many as 81% of all hacking attacks that occur today are due to weak passwords. Why do people still use weak code when people’s dangers are very obvious? Many people use the same password to log in to multiple accounts, or just choose the information they can remember most easily. Since these are usually dates, events or a series of numbers/letters, they can easily fall into the wrong hands. In this case, “123456” is still the most commonly used password in 2019, among which 23,2 million accounts are “maintained”!
You can use password generation methods that follow a unique pattern that only your employees know. This method can be recorded in the password policy, and employees can be trained to ensure compliance while working at home or in the office.
When working from home, separate personal data on users’ computers from business data
No employee will allow the company to decide how to use its own equipment. Employees also don’t remember best security practices when browsing Facebook or occasionally browsing the Web.
However, you can store work data on a remote computer so that they are not affected by personal use. In this case, virtual machines can be very useful. A VM is essentially a “software computer” with its own operating system, which runs separately from the user’s initial installation.
The hard drive of a computer can also be divided into two parts. Each part can enable specific operating systems, applications and security protocols. The method of sharing hard drives varies from system to system, so it’s best to talk to your IT staff to find the best way to assist remote workers.
Finally, remote employees can also have two different user connections, one for work and the other for personal use.
Remote scanning and data deletion of all employees
Unfortunately, the problems with best practices for remote work are not limited to incorrect policies. A study found that 86% of companies believe that remote employees increase the chance of data breaches. The study also pointed out that although these companies have contingency plans, only 35% of companies have data storage or deletion strategies, while 54% have no contingency plans at all.
In short, simply implementing a policy may not be enough. This means that specific disaster response measures must be included. Most operating systems today have remote data scanning capabilities, and administrators and users can delete their computers from any location. Data can also selectively delete some applications from Microsoft to prevent employee turnover.
Consider using VPN for business communication
The virtual private network encrypts all Internet communications to and from the device until it is disabled. They establish a secure tunnel between users and companies through the public Internet. VPN networks are of inestimable value for protecting data on insecure networks, preventing all butlers (such as ISP) from monitoring the data being sent, and helping your network administrators implement security practices for remote work.
There are two main types of VPN technology, depending on your risk limits and requirements. A remote access VPN allows users to connect to the network from any location, and is ideal for allowing remote employees to access the company network. VPN “site to site” encrypts data between two different geographic locations (for example, two offices).
There are multiple VPN protocols to choose from. Although PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) is the oldest and most advanced technology, OpenVPN is ideal for companies looking for more secure tools.
Unlike PPTP, IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) and SSTP (Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol), OpenVPN is suitable for all systems and can be adapted to your requirements.
Cloud-based Applications Boosting Productivity
It is always a good idea to have strict security practices. However, as the number of applications increases, implementing a wide range of organizational strategies can become tedious. A smarter way out is to switch to cloud-based productivity applications.
They not only facilitate remote operations through job monitoring, scheduling, and communication, but as long-distance productivity factors, they already have some of the best and latest security practices that make them ideal for remote work.
The problem with security is that although technologies can offer a lot, (But human error) user negligence stays the same. If users just let other people access the data, no level of technological development can prevent data from being compromised.
When you work from home, current decisions, daydreams and carelessness are commonplace. Therefore, training and developing good habits are as important as safety tools themselves.