The Kind of Cuts You Can't Afford to Make
For a lot of businesses, shelter in place guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic came as a bit of a shock. Scrambling to make their existing technology fit for remote work, some businesses have made security compromises for the sake of convenience.
Now that working from home is a norm for many professional businesses, it’s time to reassess remote implementation. A slapdash set up could have long lasting consequences for your cybersecurity. Taking the time to fix any loopholes you have now will benefit your business and any continuing work from home policy you have for the future.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common compromises businesses have made:
Personal Devices
Whether it’s cell phones or personal computers, using personal devices for work while working at home is a gaping security flaw. When employees use their devices for personal things, your business systems are now exposed to whatever it is they’re doing, and the issue is exacerbated if the device is also shared within their family, especially among kids. It’s best to use company issues devices that are managed by an IT contact.
Out of Date Technology
Sometimes this is part and parcel of allowing employees use their own devices. It’s also possible that in the dash to set up remote work for your employees, you handed out some old dusty laptops you had in a storage closet. Neither is ideal. Old technology will struggle to keep up, reducing productivity, and outdated software is much more vulnerable to cybersecurity threats.
Personal / Public Data Sharing
While there less secure methods of moving files than a service like Dropbox, utilizing publicly available services or other personal use applications to store and transfer critical business information exposes your valuable data to whatever vulnerabilities these platforms have. This kind of data management removes too much security from your control.
Wifi Oversight
How secure is your employees’ home wifi networks? Are they even using their own network, or are they leeching from a neighbor’s? Are they working from a Starbucks? If you don’t have oversight of the network, you simply don’t have oversight of the traffic within your business systems.
Find out where your remote technology stands
When your employees work from home, your IT policies must extend to the devices and the systems they interact with at home as well. Instituting remote work in your business can be more complicated than you initially envisioned, but you cannot lose sight of the security of your valuable data and critical infrastructure. Make no compromises with these things.
