How Remote Employees Can Keep Both Themselves and Your Business Safe Online

With the benefits of employing a remote or hybrid working arrangement well known, it is no surprise that you chose this option. Not only does it keep overheads to a minimum, but it also increases the size of your recruitment pool so that you can hire pretty much anybody in the world who is beneficial to your business.

Along with the multitude of benefits, there also come some security issues that you need to address. With so many people not working in the office, the amount of vulnerability that your network now has will have increased dramatically. The repercussionsof not taking this seriously are potential business ending – but there are somethings you canput in place that should help keep the risks involved to a minimum.

1 Lay out some ground rules

As soon as a new employee joins or as a refresher for any existing employees, you should make clear to them your expectations while they are working for you on a remote or hybrid basis.

• Don’t use public WIFI – although your employees might favor the laptop lifestyle,which is likely to involve working in coffee shops or libraries, you should make this a no-no. Public WIFI is notoriously unsound and is a common hunting ground for cybercriminals.
• Insist on VPN usage – regardless of where they choose to work, using a virtual private network when accessing the files in your business will add an extra layer of encryption. This is likely to involve a fee, but you are also likely to consider it money well spent.
• Robust passwords –insist that any password used for either their laptop or any access to your files is suitably robust. It is all too common for the same password to be used repeatedly for everything (especially amongst your older workers) or to be a variation of the name of a pet, child, or favorite band.

2 Make sure they have the right tools

This has to start with firewalls and anti-virus software, which you can install in any digital device you give them to complete their work. However, when it comes to accessing that device or your company files, you need to have something in place that will work in combination with a strong password.

Your employees will be aware of techniques like multifactor authentication, but unfortunately,many cyber criminals have come up with ways to bypass this. For instance, they can use selfies or even masks to get around facial recognition software. To combat this, you could opt for liveness detection, which requires the user to perform an action like blinking or smiling so that you know you are dealing with the genuine person.

3 Communication and support

In addition to all of these methods, you should also ensure that your employees undertake a program of end-user training so that they can spot most of the potential attacks themselves. You should also ensure that they have full access to your IT team so that they have a clear channel to report anything that concerns them or potential mistakes that they have made. Ideally, this ‘go-to’ person will be the same one that carried out the end-user training, so a rapport is already in place, and there is no extra awkwardness in what could already be a difficult conversation.

Source- https://bit.ly/49LNOuG