Are you or your employees working from home? Whether this is a new environment for you, or you have been doing it all along, there are some things to consider when working remotely.
You may find that you or your employees are now using personal devices to connect from home, or perhaps you’ve brought your work device home with you for the time being. Whatever the case, you should ask yourself: how am I protecting remote devices connected to my business network?
Setting up your device at home is only the first step. Once it is set up and working seamlessly, it is time to think about how you are going to protect it from external vulnerabilities.
These vulnerabilities can come from:
- Receiving both business and personal emails to the same device, increasing the chance of a phishing attack.
- Clicking on social media advertisements or links that could lead to having personal information compromised.
- Mixing business with pleasure; browsing sites that could have hidden threats during off-hours.
- Not having proper safety policies implemented on a new device.
- Opening a remote connection that could be hijacked by a criminal without even realizing it.
To be clear, your employees are likely not intentionally practicing risky behaviour. Usually, when a security breach happens, it is because the end-user is uninformed of the dangers, and/or there is no dedicated team responsible for monitoring safety policies to ensure they are being followed.
You may have had a staff member or IT professional performing consistent check-ups on your devices a few months ago while everyone was working in a traditional office environment. They would be in charge of ensuring updates are being installed correctly, consistent scans are being run to check your device’s health, performing real-time reporting against malware and other threats, and completing backups to complement your recovery point objectives. All of the things that we took for granted in the past may be overlooked in our new environments.
The good news is that no matter where your employees are, or which device they are working on, there’s an easy way to make sure your business network (and by association your data) is protected. It’s easier to prevent a data disaster than to recover from one.
Talk to us about how endpoint security can protect remote devices. This entails installing an agent on every device that connects to your network. This way, you will receive a notification if any devices have outdated software, a threat has emerged, or an error occurs while running scans and backups. Recovering after an attack has happened when you don’t have a safety net in place is very difficult, and in most cases, impossible. With endpoint security in place, if a data disaster strikes (because sometimes no matter what we do there can still be vulnerabilities) we can simply turn back time and reset the device to a time before it was infected. Yes, even with ransomware!
It’s important to educate your employees about new security policies, and how to spot fraudulent activities such as email phishing attacks, and remote desktop scams. However, you cannot rely on anyone to be 100% secure 100% of the time, and that’s why you must use protection.
