How to Secure Remote Working

Since the introduction of restrictions relating to COVID-19, many people have realised just how easy it is to work remotely. As long as you have a good internet connection along with cloud-based office suites and SaaS applications, you’re usually good to go.

But the big issue with working remotely is IT security, especially for organisations that need to keep sensitive information and data protected.

With this in mind, here are some tips to ensure secure remote working for employers and their employees.

Best practices for employees

The guard of employees will be down when working from home, allowing cyber criminals to exploit complacency with carefully-engineered attacks. Therefore, employees working from home should always:

• Pay attention to passwords – Especially when logging onto remote resources such as email or work applications. Staff must regularly review and strengthen their passwords too.
• Be aware of phishing – Educate employees about avoiding links that look suspicious and only download content from reliable, verifiable sources.
• Choose your device carefully – Security risks increase when employees use their work computer for personal use and vice versa. Make sure any device that staff are using features a security package with anti-virus software.
• Protect the network – Encourage employees to secure their home wifi network with a strong password to protect it against anything within range of access.

Best practices for employers

Regardless of whether an organisation’s apps and data is stored in data centres, public clouds or within SaaS applications, the following advice should be a starting point for all.

• Trust no-one – It might sound ruthless, but an organisation’s remote access plan must be built using the mindset of zero trust, where everything should be verified and nothing assumed.
• Stress-test your infrastructure – Along with having a VPN or SDP, your infrastructure should also be robust enough to be able to cope with a large volume of traffic.
• Define your data – Take the time to identify, specify and label your sensitive data. This could be time consuming, so adopt a granular approach that will serve you well once remote access is fully enabled.
• Segment your workforce – By auditing current policies and evaluating your segmentation of teams, you can rest assured that different levels of access correlate with the appropriate levels of data sensitivity