Working remotely has become fairly standard over the past year or so, and the trend, which was already growing, is likely to continue. While this has proved to be excellent when it comes to employee happiness, overall productivity, and cost-saving, there are more serious issues to contend with, and one of the biggest is that of cybersecurity.
When everyone is working together in an office, the IT systems can be closely monitored, and cyberattacks can be countered. However, when everyone is working in their own homes, it’s much more difficult to deal with cybersecurity, and cyberattacks could be more likely. Read on for some tips about how to improve your company’s cybersecurity while working remotely.
Get Outside Help
Unless they are IT experts, your team is not going to have the knowledge needed to keep their home IT systems completely up to date and secure. Although there are many things they can do – some of which we will mention later in this article – setting everything up, to begin with, and ensuring any issues are dealt with quickly and efficiently to prevent any potential data breaches is out of the skill set of most people.
Getting outside help when it comes to ensuring your cybersecurity measures are in place is crucial. Not only will a professional cybersecurity company be able to work quickly, meaning less downtime, but you can then rest assured that should anything go wrong, you’ll have someone to call upon for help.
Ask Staff to Encrypt Their Home Wi-Fi
Encryption is a great barrier to use to prevent cyberattacks. It takes your data and changes it – encrypts it – so that it can’t be understood. Only those with the encryption keys will be able to ‘unlock’ the information and use it.
Your home’s Wi-Fi may not be encrypted, and this is something that will need to be rectified if you are working from home. As long as every employee has encrypted Wi-Fi, the entire system will be much safer. Even one hole in this armor will leave the entire business susceptible to a cyberattack.
Strong Passwords
Everyone needs to use passwords for many websites and to log into different company systems. These passwords must be kept as strong as possible so that they can’t be guessed and so that a hacker can’t gain access to the business through a weak password.
The best passwords are those that are random strings of letters and numbers, but because these are so difficult to remember, people don’t tend to use them. Instead, they’ll use something much easier to remember, and they might vary it – although most of the time, they use the same one for everything. This is very poor security. It’s far better to use a password manager, which means you can then use random passwords, and you won’t have to remember them. This is the safest option.
Train Your Staff
Finally, make sure you train your staff when it comes to cybersecurity. The more you can teach them, the safer your business will be; it is well worth taking the time to do it.
You don’t have to do the training yourself, and it’s often better not to. Sending your team away for a training day or enrolling them in an online course for cybersecurity information will be much easier and will help them to be more responsible.
