Many companies working from home are making video conference calls, uploading documents and conducting their daily business online. But experts are wondering if the remote nature of work could cause extra internet security concerns down the road.
Organisations need to define their security and business continuity plans. These plans need to account for their workforce having to work from home for a minimum of three to six months more.
While most workers are used to working at the office under carefully crafted IT systems, it's impossible to quantify the number of permutations and combinations of home internet setups. Where one household could have a simple solution that works for their family, another household could have a VPN subscription in place to mask their internet usage from prying eyes.
To help you reduce the security risks you may be taking while working from home, we've collected some tips on steps you can take to guard your digital workspace and company assets.
Steps you can take to secure your data
While the consequences of poorly securing data while working from home can have severe impacts on your customers and your company, there are steps you can take to ensure the worst doesn't happen.
- Update your network security: While you should really do this on a regular basis, making sure your devices are completely up to date with the most recent security patches and upgrades can make a huge difference in securing your data.
- Ignore fraud emails: Be on the lookout for odd email addresses, poor grammar or generic greetings that don't match the personality of the individual sending the email, and whatever you do – do not provide any personal information.
- Set up remote access. It may be significantly more difficult to do this without the physical devices in front of you or your IT department, but companies should do everything they can to establish remote access protocols. This may be particularly difficult to enact, however, as you'll likely need to access the onsite devices to issue multi-factor authentication tokens.
- Required access only: Staff should be given access only to the data they need to perform their function and for only so long as that access is needed. Privileged access across the network should be limited.
- Data security: It's also concerned with storing paper records securely.
- Train your staff: A common underlying cause of regulatory failings is a lack of guidance and training to staff.
Businesses in the current scenario are facing several issues with remote working. Lack of consistency in service quality, lack of communications and breach of security being a few. If you, like many other remote workers are fearing security breaches and losing out on business assets, then simply download our FREE eGuide by clicking here.
