From the last decade, companies have been appointing the remote workforce. Remote work has been proven beneficial for both the employees and the companies.
For companies, it helps to make the company’s operations stronger and diverse, and on the other side, it offers flexible timing to the employees. Despite its huge benefits, Remote work may pose cybersecurity challenges to businesses.
So, the companies need to build great security strategies and measures to ensure their sensitive data as well as customer’s data protection.
A few tips and best practices for improving cybersecurity for your remote workforce are described below:
Monitor Your Remote Employees’ Devices
Most companies issue laptops and other devices to their employees for conducting work in the office or working remotely. Therefore, all the issued devices should be monitored by the organization to ensure only work-related activity are done on such devices.
In this way, the organizations can ensure the company’s sensitive data that travels between the company’s computers and remote employee’s device is secure from cyber attacks.
Refrain From Public Wifi
Businesses provide secure network connections inside their organizations, but their privacy fails when their remote employee’s work-related devices get in contact with public Wifi. Recent studies show that when remote workers have to travel for their business work, they mostly use public Wifi for conducting office work.
In such cases, they are easily affected by malicious worms because malicious worms easily transfer from one device to another while connected on the same network. Therefore, do not allow your employee to connect with any public or free Wifi and make some policies to avoid such issue.
Make Sure Employee Access Only HTTPS Sites
Employees should access only HTTPS sites whether they work inside the office or work remotely because these websites provide high security to user’s personal information. Many times, employees have to enter the company’s private information on websites to perform their office daily tasks.
If the websites are not secured with an SSL Certificate, the information can be stolen any time by the hackers. Besides it, install an SSL certificate from SSL2BUYon the company’s website so that the data can be encrypted that is being transmitted between your web browser and the web server. Moreover, it improves the web conversion rate and builds the customer’s trust.
ExecuteCompany-Wide Security Protocols
If hackers succeed in stealing one of the company’s employee identities, they can easily get access to organizational private information. Thus, ensure the safety of employees’ data. For this, you can execute strong security protocols in your corporation. It may include employee’s training, documentation of your company’s security policy, conducting workshops or meetings for employees.
All such meeting, workshops and training sessions help you in educating your employees about how important is the private information for a company and how to keep it secure. Moreover, you can give them a live training by phishing yourself. You can better prepare for future cyber threats by doing a phishing attack at your company.
Use A USB Data Blocker
Not only desktop computers are used for data exchange but also mobile phones are widely used for data exchanging. So, the risk may come through mobile phones, and mobile phones should be handled carefully so that the saved sensitive information is not harmed. Usually, when outside the office the phone battery is getting down, the remote employee starts finding any source where they can charge their phone. Sometimes, they choose an unknown USB port to charge their phone.
In such cases, their data can be threatened through a malware attack. Therefore, USB data blocker should be used to avoid data exchange and safeguard against malware. USB data blocker connects to the power but does not provide access to the device data.
Contingency Plan for Risk Management
The risk may come from any side, so you must have an emergency strategy to deal with it. If the data is stolen through laptop theft, it is important that the lost device or laptop will either be tracked or remotely deleted.
In this way, despite the data-stealing, the company can save itself from severe harm.
Use Multifactor Identification
Besides all the above-mentioned tips, you can also implement multifactor identification system in your organization. A little mistake of an employee may compromise your sensitive data, thus you must set-up multi-factor identification settings on your major networks and email products in order to provide an additional layer of protection to your companies as well as employee data.
In multifactor identification, an OTP (One Time Password) is sent to the employee’s phone number to verify the login process to the company’s email accounts or to the company’s system accounts. This technology has saved a number of companies from hacking.
Conclusion
Cybercriminals are getting more advanced by passing the time, therefore making your work environment in such a way that data privacy is always on the top priority for your employees. Moreover, more importantly, move your company with the latest trends and advance protection technologies because your whole business relies on it.
