Covid-19 is changing the working world to a remote environment. While social-distancing practice increases personal safety, the problem is there are serious cybersecurity risks with remote work. And these can put a company’s sensitive data at risk. A recent study by Open VPN found that 90% of IT professionals believe remote workers pose a security risk in general, and 54% believe remote employees pose a higher security risk than on-site employees.
Here are three issues related to remote working employees endangering organizations:
1. Unsafe Wi-Fi networks
Employees typically connecting to their home wireless network or, worse, access their corporate accounts using unsecured Wi-Fi. Malicious cybercriminals nearby can easily spy on their connection and harvest confidential information. As an example, data sent in an unencrypted form in plain text might be intercepted and stolen by cybercriminals. Employees should not be allowed to access any unknown Wi-Fi networks unless they are using a VPN connection.
2. Personal devices for work
It can be a scary practice when employees transfer files between work and personal computers when working from home. Most businesses are not fully aware of the issues involved when employees use personal devices for work-related matters. If they suddenly leave the company, they could be holding on to the confidential information stored on their device and not giving the employer a chance to erase it. When protected through Centrality’s DAtAnchor product, security requirements travel with the file wherever it goes, regardless of email, document management system, cloud, application platform or whether the file was taken on a USB drive. Through its dynamic access revocation, users can be immediately locked out, regardless of the device.
3. Operational Risks
When sending employees to work from home, companies may face operational risks such as not being able to support a large number of simultaneous VPN connections to their infrastructure and services. These delays cause aggravation for employees needing access to internal resources and places additional strain on in-house IT teams.
At Centrality, we can implement for your business a safe, secure, work-at-home environment. Here are some of the solutions we provide:
1. Anchorize your data with our lastest technology, DAtAnchor, to provide security requirements where ever the files are located.
1. Multi-factor authentication for an additional layer of security on top of your remote employees’ accounts
2. Password Manager so employees do not need to remember all of the different passwords for their work-related accounts. Require employees to use a non-stored password to connect during each session, especially for VPN access.
3. Enforce reasonable session time-outs for sensitive programs or applications
4. VPN connections are crucial when your employees connect to unsecured networks, such as Wi-Fi hotspots
5. Firewall prevents unauthorized access to and from the network, further strengthening the security of your employees’ devices
6. EDR solution so your system administrators should be able to see the exact details of your endpoints at all times. You need to deploy complete endpoint detection and response solution to prevent next-gen malware remotely, data leakage, respond quickly to threats, and automatically manage software deployment and patching.
7. Limit program and file access to only the areas needed by that employee
8. The ability to terminate employee access at any moment by using DAtAnchor’s dynamic access revocation
9. Private cloud for remote file storage and other tasks, so employees don’t rely on their own resources
