Working from home has been quite a familiar environment now for many office workers around Australia. In 2016, the Australian Bureau of Statistics noted that 30% of the workforce have adopted the working from home format. The COVID-19 pandemic and the current restrictions has now led a large portion of the work force to move towards the work from home lifestyle.
With a staggering 88% of employers now allowing employees to work from home, cybersecurity is being brought into question, on a different level. With private business matters now occurring in public places, cybersecurity and the impact of not taking precautions, can have detrimental effects on your business. Ensuring business is conducted securely online, is vital to ensuring privacy and safety for all involved.
In this blog, we’ll share useful information on cybersecurity whilst you’re working from home. These processes can be implemented immediately or in conjunction with relevant stakeholders within your business.
Having a data security strategy is essential to protecting your business and employees, not only within the office but also when working from home. There are a few key areas that we suggest you work on to protect your business data. These include your internet security, a separation in data from work to personal, connection security and data backup and recovery.
Internet Security
Malicious cyber-attacks are common, although they are now on the rise even more so with working environments becoming more disjointed. Your office space may already boast a protected network, to which access to data and information is restricted to any ‘outsider’. Although, this may not be the case if you are not well prepared for the working from home movement occurring. Now is the time to start thinking about how you can protect your company’s information from unauthorised access.
One method is to be proactive instead of being reactive to an attack by implementing a firewall, utilising a layer of targeted features which can be easily and centrally managed. This will monitor and control all incoming and outgoing network traffic whilst:
- Automatically blocking of known malicious or inappropriate websites.
- Restricting access to web sites, either by specific URL or by category.
- Protecting against attacks contained within emails masked as legitimate documents.
- Having an additional layer of antivirus filtering which takes place before the internet traffic reaches a computer or server.
- Protecting against ‘Ransomware’ attacks using a cloud based ‘sandbox’ to analyse the potential of incoming threats.
- Preventing the use of unauthorised third-party software to protect against infection.
- Continuously reporting to keep track of how the internet is being used.
Best practice education on password protection should be shared and implemented. As you know, your password should be strong and you should be utilising a variation of passwords. This can protect you should someone gain access via one password, as they will not have access to others.
If you’re connecting your working computer to your home network, ensure you are not making it visible to other computers within the network. You can do this by turning off the option to share files.
Don’t Mix Work and Personal
This might seem like a simple thing, but it is imperative to establish a boundary between the two to ensure your devices and ultimately your data is safe. This may seem futile and tedious but could save your company and personal data, while keeping both realms as secure as possible.
Connection Security
Secure your connection at home by implementing a Virtual Private Network, also known as VPN. This provides people who work from home extra online protection from hackers. The software creates a secure connection with another network and then encrypts traffic between those two points.
Data Backup and Recovery
Having a backup and recovery strategy in place is crucial in ensuring data security so that it can be easily recovered if required. It is important to formulate a strategy for your business which utilises both ‘on-site’ as well as a cloud based backup system, (read more on cloud backup here).
Moving to a working from home environment may seem daunting, however we are here to help. Contact us for further information on how we can support your business to ensure it’s protected.