A Primer on Remote Work Safety
The benefits of working from home, both for an organization and its employees, are too many to count at once. For employees, the lack of a long, daily commute is a big one. For companies, the drop in expenses is perhaps the biggest attraction.
The pandemic has put these benefits at the forefront like never before. But as life goes back to normal, many executives can’t help but worry about the potential cybersecurity risks of a remote work setup.
If you too are struggling to weigh the cost-saving benefits of remote work against the cybersecurity risk of it, keep reading for some expert insights.
The Risks of Allowing Remote Work
With businesses investing more into software and hardware solutions each year aimed at curbing digital threats, the modern workplace offers plenty of protection. With employees working from home, however, a lot of those defenses get diluted, if not discarded altogether. This is especially true for some software and hardware solutions.
Does this mean you should force your employees back to the office and say goodbye to the savings? The answer is a resounding no.
With the right systems and policies in place, you can easily mitigate the risks of going remote. Let’s talk more about how to do that.
The 3 Key Areas for Mitigating Remote Work Risks
The surest plans are the simplest of plans. As such, we highly recommend investing in the following three key areas to mitigate the risks of remote work effectively:
1. Dedicated Systems
One of the best things you can do for the cybersecurity of your organization is to invest in dedicated systems for all
employees working from home. Most of the risks of remote work can be mitigated by having employees use the same systems they were using at work.
In practice, this means handing out a company-provided work-only laptop that comes packed with all the security systems pre-installed. While this may cost more up front, the dividends you get in terms of safety from digital disasters make it a small price to pay.
Apart from dedicated devices, we highly recommend offering your employees mobile data packages for work. This way, they won’t rely on free and unsecure public WiFi networks when accessing business assets from outside.
2. Employee Training
You can invest in some of the most secure systems out there and still fall prey to a cyberattack. The truth is, most digital defense systems are as good as the people using them. A single click on the wrong link or response to the wrong sender is all it takes to compromise the entire business network.
That’s why we cannot overstate the importance of investing in cybersecurity training for your employees. By bringing them up to speed with the best practices of using a digital system, be it the device in their palms or the internal applications of your organization, you can easily avoid the simplest yet most prevalent digital threats out there.
A professional training program will include insights on detecting and avoiding phishing attacks, using safe passwords, looking out for signs of a compromised system, and more.
3. Access Management
Finally, you should invest in identity and access management systems that let you easily filter out any abnormal connections. The simplest way to implement this is by setting up multifactor authorization for all your internal systems and external accounts. This single piece of the cybersecurity puzzle can keep you safe from the vast majority of attacks out there.
If you want to take things to the next level, you should consider adopting and implementing a zero-trust policy. This way, every service and system in your network will secure itself independently. As a result, a single compromised node won’t automatically take everything else down with it.
By investing in these three key areas of cyber defense, your organization will get all the benefits of employees working from home without any compromises in the integrity of your organization’s network.Â
Contact us for information on our Security Awareness Training for your staff, which will educate your employees on important topics such as password health, phishing awareness, social engineering and more. If you’d like to schedule a 15-minute consultation with one of Optistar’s Senior IT Consultants, visit here, as they’d be happy to answer any questions you may have or give you details on Optistar’s cyber security solutions.
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