Securing Your Other Perimeter: Your Remote Employees' Workplace

While the rise of the work-from-home lifestyle has created myriad benefits for workers worldwide, every new system brings new challenges. Learning how to secure important company data from cyberattacks—mainly when that data exists on employees’ vulnerable home networks—is an important step in protecting your network and, ultimately, the longevity of your business.

Fortunately, there are several ways to help your employees and colleagues protect their data when logging in and working remotely. Read on for four work-from-home data protection tips. 

Invest In a Protective VPN

When protecting your business, a virtual private network (VPN) is crucial for keeping workers’ internet connections secure. In addition to obscuring IP addresses and allowing for safe connections to public Wi-Fi hotspots, VPNs create encrypted data tunnels that prevent you and your workers from being watched online.

Benefits of using a VPN include:

• Preventing cyber attackers from hijacking your data through a public hotspot
• Eliminating the threat of DDoS attacks
• Speeding up your connection by preventing your ISP from slowing down data streaming
• Ensuring private internet browsing remains private
• Allowing you to travel safely, even when laptops and other devices connect to unsecured Wi-Fi networks

A range of VPN solutions can help provide site-to-site VPN and mobile VPN to business associates, employees, and even clients for both single- or multiple-location businesses.

Encourage Employees to Perform Digital Hygiene 

All it takes is one crack in your defenses to cause system-wide damage to your business. Employees who’ve yet to secure their hardware, including modems and routers, should be encouraged to update and replace outdated tech as soon as possible to prevent otherwise avoidable breaches.

Remind workers to implement these important digital hygiene tips for maximum security:

• Enable automatic updates whenever possible
• Install up-to-date modem and router firmware
• Disable remote management (or, if needed, enable multi-factor authentication)
• Change modem and router passwords frequently
• Enable website filtering
• Reboot modems and routers once a month to keep internet connections speedy and healthy

While these are all crucial parts of protecting your business, enforcing home network hygiene can be difficult—especially within enterprise businesses, where networks are large, and closing all potential entry points can be time-consuming.

For these reasons, partnering with a dedicated cybersecurity firm can help.    

Partner With a Dedicated Security Firm

Your organization may very well possess the know-how, data, and technology to stop cyber criminals in their tracks. However, combating cyberattacks takes constant effort, and the never-ending evolution of digital threats means you may need to sacrifice crucial time and resources that could otherwise be spent bolstering your bottom line.

To address these issues, consider pairing with a trusted cyber security firm that can assess and disarm phishing, hacking, and other cyber threats. As with any third-party protection service, partnering with an information security consultant or a full-service agency comes with a buy-in price. However, the training programs and risk assessments these organizations offer are well worth the cost.

Shore Up Your Wi-Fi Connection 

Cyber attackers are always looking for the easiest way to infiltrate your network—unfortunately, that often means preying upon compromised Wi-Fi networks. By engaging in phishing scams that lead employees to reveal Wi-Fi passwords and other secure data, cybercriminals can quickly hijack home networks and cause widespread damage to your business enterprise.

Not only that, but cyber attackers who enter your network can cause even more harm by posing as colleagues and employees to secure financial data, trade secrets, and other highly confidential information.

Remote work is a great model for flexibility and employee satisfaction. Be sure you are covering your bases when it comes to security wherever your team works from!