Rethinking Your IT With A Decentralized Workforce – Chapter 1 : Security

With an increasingly remote or hybrid workforce, we must rethink the way you look at your IT. Let’s first examine network security and how to ensure that your company’s data is safe.

 

Improving Your Security

Employee Training

It is always vital that your employees know the basics of how to detect a possible attack. Therefore, ensuring that your employees understand and can identify specific attacks (like phishing) prevents a network breach. This knowledge is essential within a remote workforce so it is best to send out additional training material to ensure they are aware of the types of attacks.

 

During the pandemic, many scams have been circulating. This makes it even more important to educate your workforce on detecting specific scams that make you click out of the email and onto a different site. These types of emails could potentially be an attack on the corporation’s network.

 

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have three main benefits. They allow you to access information and resources remotely from offsite locations, encrypt connections, and provide access control for some corporate networks.

So, it is always good to make sure that your VPN is up to date on your server or devices used by your employee.

However, you should note that VPNs do not protect against all attacks and threats to the network. For example, it protects against data sniffing but is less likely to protect against phishing. 

 

Password Managers

Password managers allow you to securely keep track of all your passwords so you do not forget them. Not only do they allow you to keep your data secure, but you can change your passwords easily without the risk of forgetting them.

Using a good password manager can help you work smoothly and without much hassle as it saves you the effort to remember passwords and can create secure passwords for you to use.

 

Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication (2FA) allows you to set up a more secure way of logging in and accessing your data. What 2FA does is that it asks the user to enter their password as well as a one time pin (OTP) sent to their email or mobile phone. Once they’ve entered both, they can access the data they want or log in. 2FA can also include facial recognition or fingerprint scanning.

Using 2FA, you ensure that only admins and employees can access the data and prevent unwanted attacks.

 

Encrypt Sensitive Data

From a security standpoint, data encryption is always the best solution. Data encryption becomes even more essential when employees work remotely as devices could get lost or sensitive data could be intercepted while traveling and using insecure networks.

It is vital to ensure that data exchanged between company-owned systems and remote work locations is encrypted while it travels over the network. You can ensure this by using a VPN as well as making sure that your remote access tools like your Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client are up to date.

 

Know Your Connections

Knowing who you are connecting to goes hand-in-hand with educating your workforce. It is essential to know who or what network you are connecting to so as to prevent possible attacks. Your employees must know about connecting to public networks and the risks involved in this. 

Education about connections should include how to connect to a VPN and how to tell if a network is trustworthy or not.

 

Conclusion

Security should be your number one concern when moving to a location-flexible workforce. Possible attacks need to be anticipated and prevented accordingly. So, make sure that you consider these security procedures when thinking about your IT with a workforce that can be working from the office or remotely. 

Fore more information on how to improve data security for your business with a decentralized workforce, reach out to one of our MicroAge locations.