03 Apr How to Ensure Security for Remote Workers
The massive shift to employees working from home due to quarantine restrictions of COVID-19 can leave some uncertainty when it comes to ensuring your security with a new remote workforce. We are going to sharing a few of those challenges and how you can ensure security for those remote workers.
Companies will see a few performance challenges because of the rapid increase in the number of people working from home. These issues could range from strain on remote access infrastructure, VPN connection, remote application issues, and unfamiliar remote users will see an increasing strain on IT departments, as well as cause some employee frustration.
One way to help with ensuring security for your remote workers is is to measure your utilization. You may be lacking adequate network bandwidth to handle the increased demand of remote users, which could be causing some challenges for your users.
Many remote workers may not have been issued company laptops and, therefore, are taking home their PCs or are using personal devices. With that being the case, it exposes a company to several threats, because those devices are no longer under the protection of firewalls and monitoring services while other remote workers may be accessing the corporate network through an unsecured VPN connection.
All these issues combined can leave an easy way for hackers to take advantage of the current work environment. We have already seen an increasing amount of COVID-19 related phishing attacks targeting remote users.
Some easy steps to help ensure your security for your remote workers during this time would be to know where your remote workers are remoting in from. The geographic origin of external IPs connecting to a VPN concentrator or access gateway will provide a warning if something looks suspicious.
Are people using approved remote access tools? Remote users are not using public WiFi? It is essential to make sure that your employees are following your company’s security policies at all times.
Also, by monitoring active directory accounts, this will allow you to see if there have been excessive lockouts, failed logins, and the use of disabled accounts. All are signs that could mean a hacker has compromised a user device and is trying to gain access to more resources.
Educating your users is also an easy way to ensure security for your remote workers. Your users must know and understand the risks, as well as, follow company policies and guidelines for security.
If you don’t know where to start by implementing these policies and guidelines for your team, contact our team to help set them up for you. We can help set up your remote workforce to ensure that your company is secure.