How to Maintain Security When Employees Work Remotely

Since the pandemic, businesses have been forced to make significant changes to how they hire and manage employees. Now, remote working is a standard option in most companies, which means organizations can leverage the best talent from across the entire world.

Gaining top talent through a remote offer can lead to great volumes of success. However, it can also increase your risk of being successfully targeted by malicious actors. In fact, a report from Verizon showed that 79% of businesses said remote working harmed cybersecurity.

Why do businesses need to secure remote access?

The answer is simple. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report, the average data security breach increased by more than $1 million when remote users were involved. Of course, cyber risks have always been a concern for organizations, but poor practices among remote workforces vulnerabilities.

Remote security challenges

Research from Malwarebytes highlighted the most significant cyber security concerns when it comes to remote operations. The most prominent challenge is that employees may feel safe and relaxed when working from home, but others can access their devices and could inadvertently compromise them.

Other highly recognized security challenges include employees not having strong passwords and satisfactory cybersecurity protections in place across their personal devices and networks, difficulties managing new devices with remote working resources and IT support struggling to solve issues for employees that are working from home.

Learn more: Password Manager: Your Employees' New Best Friend

The remaining, widely experienced security challenges included:

• Challenges in the offboarding process when necessary to prevent individuals leaving a company from unauthorized future access to information
• Higher risk of ransomware attacks and increased malware attacks overall
• Remote employees lack adequate cybersecurity training and are consequently unable to act accordingly to avoid potential threats
• Cloud collaboration tools not offering a suitable level of cybersecurity

Remote security best practices

Working remotely can cause employees to lose sight of security protocols and priorities. Ultimately, it’s not easy to apply current security policies to a remote environment, but here are some of the best practices you can implement within your organization to ensure sensitive company information is safe and secure.

1. Establish a culture of security

Across any aspect of business, establishing and maintaining a healthy culture means putting people at the heart of policies. With cybersecurity, it can be easy to simply focus on the technical side of things and ignore how people really work, but this isn’t a good way to guarantee success.

Without a healthy security culture, employees simply won’t engage with cybersecurity. The thing is, when policies and structures make it challenging for people to do their jobs, they’ll naturally find a way around it. If a healthy culture doesn’t exist, you won’t find out about how your employees choose to work around issues until it’s too late. So, a great cybersecurity culture means you’ll be involved in decisions, always have a solid picture of your security risks and be open to staff input on how processes or policies could be improved.

2. Secure all internet connections and ensure staff have adequate tools

This isn’t to say that an employee working remotely must only do so from their home. If a member of staff wants to conduct business at their local coffee shop, that’s absolutely fine. However, they need to have a concrete understanding of security policies and, if possible, they should be using a company-provided VPN to ensure the connection is safe.

As part of helping remote employees establish secure connections, you’ll have to supply them with the tools and resources they need to remain safe and compliant with all company policies and procedures. If you and your employees spend less time worrying about security and compliance, you’ll inevitably have more time available to get your jobs done.

3. Require employees to connect over VPNs

As mentioned above, a VPN is a key tool to guarantee security. Similar in some ways to firewalls, they are extremely popular because they offer a high level of protection to remote devices containing sensitive company information, while retaining the same appearance and functionality as if they were within the business network.

As a note of caution, though, not every VPN will work for your business. The best way around this is to make sure the VPN you’re interested in, or already using, covers all of the aspects and requirements you need. It’s also worth shopping around a little to conduct your own research into each provider’s reviews and how the costs differ from one VPN to another.

4. Implement BYOD/MDM policies

Bring your own device (BYOD) has become a very common practice within the hybrid working world and isn’t slowing down any time soon. Research showed that almost 75% of IT leaders thought BYOD to be great, and this way of working had increased by just under 60% in the last two years.

Overall, BYOD saves time and money, promoting productivity by facilitating employees to work from anywhere they choose. However, BYOD covers any device that’s connected to the internet. It’s not just computers, but also smartphones, tablets and more. Therefore, it can be a challenge to manage securely.

Learn more: 7 BYOD Nightmares Every CIO Needs to Address

Luckily, mobile device management (MDM) is the answer. This is a strategy to ensure mobile (or remote) devices are being used securely by your employees safely and correctly. It’s often delivered via the cloud or other networks to separate business data from personal information, as well as monitor or restrict the use of devices.

With MDM, each employee will have to download an agent onto their device, which essentially protects vital company data. Other features include remote wiping, which solves offboarding issues and can be crucial in the instance that a member of staff loses their device, or suspects it’s been stolen.

5. Implement zero-trust

The ‘zero-trust’ approach, a term coined by Microsoft, involves one simple principle: never trust, always verify. Effectively, this provides businesses security and protection by managing and permitting access based on a continuous verification system. It sounds quite complicated, but to initiate your own zero-trust approach, all you need to do is treat every remote access request as though it originated from an unrecognized or uncontrolled network, authenticating it as per company protocol.

6. Install MFA

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) requires users to provide several different types of information to verify their identity. Some common examples of this include biometrics, personal identification numbers (PINs), push notifications and security questions. An obvious form of MFA that most of us will have come across is two-factor authentication (2FA).