Many companies are now utilising the ease and convenience of remote working and a lot have ditched offices altogether. While working from home has many benefits, there are certain drawbacks such as limited control of security which leads to increased risks.
There are however several solutions which you can promote to ensure your staff are being safe and secure online and keep any sensitive work information locked away.
The first is to encourage staff to use strong passwords. This is one of the most basic ways to ensure security and is easy to manage and keep on top of as well.
The best passwords are those which are long, use a variety of letters numbers and special characters and also are random. Using a secure password generator may be a good idea if you want staff to change passwords frequently.
For all work accounts, you can manage passwords internally and update any of your staff with password changes. For example, many programmes or software accounts have passwords which are changed every few months or annually and this can be done on a company-wide scale.
Another key player in online security is multi-factor authentication. You should encourage colleagues to utilise this wherever possible as it adds a very easy yet additional layer of security to all accounts.
This can be done via additional email accounts or phone numbers and prevents anyone without access to these from getting into any secure accounts, regardless of whether they have the password for the account or not.
By encouraging the use of multi-factor authentication, you can help prevent any sensitive information from making its way into unknown hands and help to keep your company and staff safe from information leaks.
Using a VPN, or virtual private network, when accessing sensitive company information is a must, especially if you handle customer information and data.
You can launch this on a company-wide scale and have all employees access anything work-related via this VPN to help keep all data internal and prevent it from being transferred across unsecured or public Wi-Fi networks.
This adds extra peace of mind for both you and your employees, especially if they handle large amounts of sensitive information, as they know it is protected no matter where they are working from.
You may also wish to request all remote employees use a secured private Wi-Fi connection from their homes. This can help to prevent anyone from accessing their Wi-Fi and therefore the devices and data using said network.
Using cloud software to store all company information instead of allowing employees to store it directly on their computers is another great way to say secure online as it prevents employees from being able to share documents, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Many cloud softwares come with the option of turning off downloads or
transfers of documents and are also great for collaborative working, making them the perfect choice regardless of the type of information being shared between employees.
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