Should your Business have a Work from Home Cybersecurity Policy?
Work from home organizations all over the world have been polishing their strategies to enable their employees to work from remote locations at whatever time they like.
However, when allowing workers to perform their duties from different types of locations there is a potential risk of cybersecurity threats involved. You cannot just sit around not expecting anything to happen. On the contrary, you must always anticipate, be ready to defend, and fix any problem that arises.
Working in a traditional office is completely different because you can control everything that happens over your office network. It is a different story when you are dealing with every employee on a different network.
During the last ten years, working from home had gained momentum and the organizations evolved their networks to match the changing trend. However, the current pandemic has put this trend into hyperdrive with many employees forced to work from home who otherwise would never have had encountered the need to do so.
If you are one of the organizations dealing with the dilemma then the first thing to encourage your employees to do is to sign up to an internet service provider that takes the privacy and security of its customers very seriously. For example, if you sign up to one of the Spectrum packages, Spectrum not only makes sure that its usage logs are kept secure but also provides you a free security suite to keep your network airtight and secure from cybercrimes.
Security Challenges you face when Working from Home
Organizations are facing another increasingly evident problem on top of the remote access challenges. Phishing, malware, social engineering, and ransomware attacks are being focused on new campaigns and are becoming quite diverse to include several different devices.
What adds to this problem is the fact that most employees use company devices off-network as well, thus becoming invisible and uncontrollable by the company. This adds to the risk of a security breach. As soon as an employee decides to use a device over a non-registered network, they open themselves up to a vast world of cybercrimes.
As the trend towards remote work gains pace with the use of affordable devices, reliable high-speed internet connections, and fully functional remote access tools, it is highly probable that cybercrimes may gain pace as well by targeting these remote access settings that are not tightly secured as an office network. If new tools and strategies are not put in place to prevent security breaches then companies may end up falling victim to all sorts of cybercrimes that may end up being much more costly than maintaining a workforce at the office.
Remote Access Security Challenges
With too many remote workers using VPNs to access work-related data, applications, and services when using public Wi-Fi VPNs are being strained under the additional weight of users sending way too much data over networks. This ends up creating bottlenecks and contribute towards increasing the security threats to devices and data being transferred over these so-called secure networks. Some businesses are moving on to cloud-based access due to the limited features of VPNs to take advantage of more scalability and control.
Developing a Work from Home Security Policy
Considering this new era of new work arrangements, remote access, and increased cyber threats, organizations are required to come up with policies, processes, and solutions that cater to this new league of the remote workforce. To be able to provide frictionless and secure access, companies have to redesign their IT ecosystem to come up with tactics that cover remote access challenges. These include departmental systems, data centers, cloud gateways, and edge computing.
Following are a few security issues that companies need to consider to overcome the various cyber threats looming over the networks of their workforce:
Permissions and Privileges
Identity Management
Policy Management
Cybersecurity Training
Bring your Policies for applications, devices, and the cloud
Things a Home Security Solution should include
Working from home or wherever else you want to work from is quickly becoming the new normal for employers and employees all over the world. The flexibility and convenience are just too compelling for both making it too hard to go back to the physical office set up. Therefore, providing secure application access is crucial for both remote and onsite workers. It plays a much more important role for remote workers as they usually connect through unprotected or sometimes under-protected networks.
This means that companies need to make strategic decisions regarding the tools and services to be used to ensure every employee’s cybersecurity. Regardless of your geographical location, the number of employees, or industry sector, it is necessary for businesses to devise access tools that allow the unification of visibility and protection of all employees. These cybersecurity tools need to be looked at holistically so that they can be deployed efficiently and any gaps in security can be avoided.
Companies must take a comprehensive view of security to be able to deliver high-security access to contractors, employees, and partners who access applications, services, and data remotely. SOURCE