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How To Educate Your Employees and Create a Safe Environment for Remote Work

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Elijah Ltd.
How To Educate Your Employees and Create a Safe Environment for Remote Work

Many safety challenges can be solved by informing and educating your employees about their commitments and obligations when they are working from home. A well-informed workforce is the greatest asset to security management. Here are some essential tips to help make your virtual workplace safer.

  • Access a secure connection through virtual desktops or VPN, as home networks are always prone to attacks.
  • Protect your router from external access as hackers constantly seek to attack routers connected via DSL, cable or fiber optics. To do this you must provide secure passwords and not reuse passwords.
  • Secure your WLAN. If you must work with a home network, choose a long and complex password that cannot be easily cracked.
  • Update your devices regularly, running updates to operating systems and antivirus.

 

How To Implement Web Security and Take Care of Your Organization’s Confidential Data

 

Remote work is one of technology’s biggest advantages. Employees feel more comfortable, avoid traveling during peak hours and manage their time better, while employers reduce their infrastructure costs.

Anytime computers are connected to the Internet, there are certain measures to take into account to guarantee safe remote work and avoid attacks, loss or leakage of information.

 

  • When working from home, it is important to ensure a work environment that does not expose personal information or violate company data. Choose a suitable workplace where both these activities are not combined.
  • Similarly, it is important to remain alert to any type of cyber-attack that may occur via email. Phishing is one of the most common scams in recent times, it is necessary to identify and detect any suspicious email, with poorly written links or from unapproved senders.
  • To avoid any security breach in the information of the organizations, it is necessary to limit the risks, monitor, react and contain any signs of attack or intrusion within the corporate networks and also ensure that the employees execute the necessary measures. Likewise, the implementation of web security through powerful defense technologies against network attacks and anti-phishing can help accurately detect and block these threats so that criminals cannot take advantage of employees who work from home.

 

Additionally, everything related to teamwork, responsibility and costs must be clearly defined before implementing a remote working situation. Will personal devices be used or will the company provide them? Will there be adequate technical support to resolve access and security issues? Who will be able to access what information?

These and many other questions are answered in our free remote work guide. Included is an interesting section which summarizes the seven pillars for safe remote work.

 

  1. Role Management

The information should only be accessible to user profiles who need to view and modify it. For everyone else the information should be restricted.

Responsibilities must be established according to the set objectives. Aspects such as the control of technologies, making backup copies or recovery processes are some of the tasks that must have an executor and a defined time.

 

  1. Device Control

Considering the wide variety of devices on the market, it is important to allow access only to those with the appropriate security tools applied.

For example, for an employee to access your organization’s critical data from their personal computer with an updated operating system and with a security solution installed is not the same as accessing the information from an outdated tablet, unprotected device that their child also uses to play and download applications.

 

  1. Protection Against Malicious Code

To ensure that data is not affected by malicious code, all devices used by the employee must have security solutions that proactively detect these types of threats.

If the device from which you access is not owned by the company and, in addition, virtualized environments are not used, the risks of suffering an infection are higher. In addition, all applications must be up-to-date to avoid the exploitation of vulnerabilities that can lead to security breaches.

 

  1. Network Traffic Monitoring

Since there are devices that are entering the network outside the physical perimeter of the office, it is necessary to keep track of what type of traffic they generate. For example, where they try to access, if there are recurring and failed attempts to enter servers or if they generate some type of inappropriate traffic, such as downloading unknown files.

 

  1. Secure Connections

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a network technology used to connect one or more computers to a private network using the Internet, so that remote access to corporate resources is secure.

For remote employees, the implementation of client-based VPN connections is the most convenient since they allow a user to be connected to a remote network through an application that is responsible for establishing communication and setting up the VPN.

To access the secure connection, the user must run the application and authenticate with a username and password and even add a second authentication factor. In this way, an encrypted channel is created between the computer and the remote network, which is ideal for a secure exchange of data.

 

  1. Drafting a Security Policy

Through a security policy, the obligations and responsibilities of users regarding the use of the technologies available to them are determined.

This policy must define the type of actions that can be taken and who is authorized to execute them. Trying to modify a database outside the company is not the same as making inquiries and reports.

Each policy is specific to the reality of the organization and the scope established for its employees. However, it must be based on a recognition of the information assets, since it is not possible to control something, whose status is unknown.

 

  1. Employee Awareness

Education and training should be an important pillar so that all users are aware of the risks that they may be exposed to and what care they should take when using devices outside the company.

People must understand that even if they are outside the office, the device from which they work is a door to the entire organization, so they must ensure proper use.

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