For the last two years, a massive chunk of employees has been working from home. Exact figures revealed by a survey by IDG say that more than 78 percent of the workforce are working remotely today. This trend has been going to continue for quite some time now. Although some companies call a few employees to the office, others abstain from doing so. Many companies are deliberately recruiting remote workers. They want these recruits to work from home permanently.
Remote working is a great way to keep the staff safe and healthy, owing to the still-raging COVID-19 virus. However, it can cause a massive security threat for your organization if you do not enforce adequate measures. It is valid to a considerable extent that remote working opens your organization’s attack surface to cybercriminals. Moreover, it gets challenging to monitor every employee working from home. Here are a few ways to keep your workforce safe from cybercrimes.
Prohibit Personal Device Usage
When employees work from home, they use personal devices to access company systems and mails. These are any day less secure than systems and devices used at the workplace. Additionally, even if the devices have software for security, they might not be updated, and the passwords might also be weak.
Call your workforce in small numbers to the office and give them adequate IT support for their devices. Your company should provide them with the necessary equipment. Additionally, you can install applications on these devices to monitor data exchanges. You can allow content storage on the cloud delegated to the company.
Use VPN Connections for Security
If your IT security team is thinking about managing the company’s virtual network, it might not be easy. Moreover, it is not possible to extend the connections to every employee. So, you have to create groups and sub-groups. Identify all those who need to access sensitive information. So, such a reorganization of VPN connections will ensure that only a few employees access essential data. Even if one team member gets attacked, it will stop right there. Cybercriminals will not be able to attack others or steal any data.
You can make security operations ServiceNow a part of your company’s framework. You can get your team’s VPNs configured in several ways. However, these configurations usually depend on your organization’s needs and the security licenses. Using such a framework, the security analysts can communicate with your IT team hassle-free. Assignment of tasks to different departments under IT also gets easy with such frameworks in place. Most data are secured and held under the security and not the admin. The system also offers dashboards, through which you can visually track the data relevant to all security incidents.
Train Your Employees on Router Basics
The IT personnel might not visit every employee and check the systems and routers. So, it is essential to train all your employees in network security. You have to ensure proper training, and you can still do this virtually. Thus, your employees should be able to create a secure network for themselves. They should make a separate network for work and another for personal use in the process. By using this methodology, your workers can prevent cybercriminals from attacking the company’s information.
Pay Attention to App Security
Your employee might not know how to deal with situations relating to applications on their devices. Some might have already reported that they do not consider their apps safe enough. They might mention something during a virtual meeting and see an advertisement for that object on social media the very next moment. The mics and cameras associated with apps might be responsible for the same.
You should train your employees to lock the apps on their devices and others on the family’s devices as well. All of them will probably be using the same network. That is why it is a cause for concern. You ought to rope in the right solutions in the form of X.509 certificates and integrate them with password-less solutions. This approach will make your employee’s apps more secure while omitting the need for VPN connections.
Prepare for All Kinds of Attacks
While devising the right plans to mitigate an attack is a great initiative. You should prepare your team to deal with an attack. The worker’s device might be stolen, or there might be a data breach. It is a realistic situation. You ought to have a plan for that. Therefore, you need to train all employees working remotely on security aspects. It is not only the IT’s or the security team’s job to do so. Ask them to take backup, restrict personal use on office devices, and use anti-virus.
These are a few ways to keep your emote workforce safe. Do not compromise on workplace and workforce remote work access points and tools. It will help your organization surpass attacks and resolve breaches faster, too.
