4 security practices for remote workforce

Employee search is becoming a problem in Hungary. According to recent research, it is becoming harder to find an appropriate candidate for an empty position and the search for every potential employee can take up to 3 weeks: all in all, it is a difficult, long and not always effective process.

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Hiring a remote workforce can be a solution to this problem. However, you need to consider some risks and challenges (especially connected with cyber threats) your company might face. That’s why it is important to create work conditions that would be both comfortable and safe for your remote employees.

In this article we will give you some recommendations on organizing remote access for your staff; if you are a representative of a Hungarian company that decided to increase the staffing with a remote workforce, it will come in handy.

Now, what are the main 4 security practices for the remote workforce?

1. Well-thought-out BYOD Security Policy

First of all, what is BYOD? BYOD meaning is Bring Your Own Device – it’s a set of rules that regulate the work of company personnel with their own equipment.

Remote employees use their own equipment for work. It leads to certain cyber security threats, such as:

• Worker`s device can be lost or stolen along with all the company information;
• Infected devices can harm other workers` devices through a shared network;
• Usage of jailbroken, rooted operation systems.

To avoid these risks you need to form your company’s BYOD policy properly.

Proper BYOD policy should contain the following points:

• Forbidding to use devices with jailbroken, rooted operation systems;
• Requiring strong passwords, time-out locking;
• Using company-provided anti-virus and protective software;
• Setting up protocols for reporting a lost or stolen device right away;
• Encouraging regular backups.
• Using two-factor authentication to access personal computers and all apps used for work.

2. Implement Cloud Storage and VPN

Besides the above-mentioned recommendations, for your corporate data safety, it is also beneficial to use cloud storage or VPN.

With remote work comes the risk of the employees to use the data from your company’s file servers from unsafe public networks. To avoid such problems you need to implement remote Virtual Private Network (VPN) access for your employees. One of the VPN tasks is encrypting the data to protect it from intruders. A VPN is also able to protect the network from viruses even better than firewalls, which often compromise data access.

Another option is using cloud services like Office 365 or G Suit, etc., for storing and exchanging corporate information. Storing data in a cloud considerably simplifies access to it and your staff doesn’t need to save confidential files on their devices. At the same time, it’s much easier to protect cloud storage from cyber-attacks and unauthorized access.

No matter which cloud services you choose, we strongly encourage enabling MFA with hardware tokens for all your employees including office and remote staff.

3. Email Security

These days business communication and information exchange mostly take place in emails. To make sure this way of sharing data is reliable you need to integrate mandatory email encryption across all company emails. Encryption tools are more effective and easy to use; still, they can work together with the older data loss prevention systems. Besides, you need to secure the emails from all endpoints, such as PCs, Macs, and mobiles, as well as software and CRM systems.

4. Two-Factor Authentication

This step is required for all services the employees have access to. It is not hard to organize: almost every service offers this option.

Besides, there are lots of options for setting two-factor authentication in company infrastructure.

For example, if all your systems are connected to Active Directory, you can easily set the AD authentication in a way so that it will demand standard and one-time passwords at the time of each entry to every service connected with AD.

Moreover, the device which is used by an employee to log in has to be protected with two-factor authentication. If your employee uses Windows or connects to your corporate computer via RDP, there are easy to set up 2FA solutions for Winlogon and RDP. For iOS devices, the 2FA feature is available out-of-the-box.

Let’s sum up by answering a common question: “Why is cybersecurity important?” It is important because it is just as valuable as physical security, and can be infringed upon by intruders.

So if you want to keep your company safe in every way, make sure to take care of its cybersecurity!