A lot of businesses have transitioned to a remote workforce due to the current health crisis. As we face uncertain times, this new setup brings forth challenges in productivity, company morale, and operations.
But more importantly, business leaders should be aware of the potential security issues that their remote teams might face now they are not working in an office. Forbes points out that the remote working setup puts your business at risk, as your remote workers might not practice good cybersecurity measures while working.
To protect your business and your remote teams, here are three cybersecurity practices that you should consider.
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Assess the Risks
Before you can boost the security of your teams, you should first understand the potential threats that befall remote operations. Through this, you can carefully craft a highly-organized framework that’ll mitigate any risks and threats that your remote teams might encounter.
For one, if your remote workers are using their personal devices to carry out their work, they’re more vulnerable to certain cyber threats.
Malware is one of these, and if they don’t have reliable anti-malware software, they’re putting pertinent information in peril. Other cybersecurity threats that Kaspersky reported are increasing are brute-force attacks. A lot of telecommuters rely on Remote Desktop Protocols (RDP) to connect to their workstations, and as a result hackers have targeted these with brute-force attacks to illegally obtain enterprise information.
As you assess which risks your enterprise has a higher probability of encountering, you can better craft guidelines and protocols to avoid security vulnerabilities with your remote workforce
Invest in the Right Security Tools
No matter the size of your enterprise, you should invest in the right software and tools to fortify your cybersecurity. This may come at a high price, but it’s all worth it.
Data breaches and cyber attacks are not to be taken lightly, as these can potentially cost you revenue, and, in the worst case, even your business. In HP’s guide to ensuring business continuity in remote working setups, they recommend hardening your telecommuting security with tools like VPNs, robust backup and recovery solutions, and secure devices. All of these are necessary in ensuring that your remote teams are sufficiently protected.
For your remote workforce to be truly protected, they should have a holistic system of different software and services to ensure that cybercriminals won’t find any vulnerabilities.
Keep Your Teams Informed
Since remote working is a fairly new setup for a lot of workers, you’ll have to train your teams on how to be productive at home. This ranges from the software they need to use to continue operations to the tools that connect them with their managers and other team members.
However, your telecommuting training program should also focus on cybersecurity. This includes teaching them how to bolster the security of their networks, make their passwords harder to crack, and how to use endpoint encryption.
To make your cybersecurity training more effective, Jason Forrest writes on Entrepreneur that you should motivate your employees to want to secure their remote setup.
This can be done by explaining to them how a weak cybersecurity system not only endangers the enterprise’s data, it also exposes their own personal information
All of these practices are necessary if you want to have smooth-sailing remote operations.
From doing preliminary assessments to handing out security services for your telecommuting teams, you can ensure that your team won’t run into security problems at home.
