5 ways to tackle cyber threats when working from home

Over the last decade, businesses have increasingly migrated their key operations online. Software solutions act as the backbone of this modern world, helping companies provide uninterrupted service for their customers around the clock. This widespread adoption of such solutions—largely down to its cost-effectiveness—has opened up multiple business possibilities, including the now-popular practice of “Working from home.”

The work-from-home culture is already adopted by almost one in five workers from around the world, and these numbers are expected to only increase further. Contrary to popular belief, studies have found that employees working from home are more productive than ones at work, prompting employers to consider this option for their businesses as well.

Replicating the office atmosphere
The primary focus for any business should be providing their employees with the tools they would require to be productive at home. With a computer or mobile device and a stable internet connection, your employees would be just a few tools away from recreating the office atmosphere. Here are some applications that can help your employees get started:

• A messaging platform to connect with your team
• A content management and file sharing service to organize your documents
• A project management tool to organize daily tasks and keep the team on track
• A video conferencing solution to conduct virtual meetings and training sessions
• A social intranet software to collaborate across departments and with multiple teams

Addressing the security challenges
Aligning your employees with the organization’s security policies can be tricky when they work from remote locations. Employees can often overlook security constraints when left on their own, causing potential concerns for their employers. In such cases, mandating the use of these few applications can keep your businesses out of potential cyber threats:

• VPN
• MFA
• Password manager
• SSO
• Backup

Virtual Private Network
You have little to no control over what networks your employees use when they work from home. There are chances that they could perform sensitive tasks from cyber cafes, airport lounges, coffee shops, and other public WiFi networks. A VPN would be very handy in such situations, granting safe access to your data while also allowing employees to securely connect with the office network.

Multi-factor authentication
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) adds additional protection to sensitive accounts by validating the identity of an individual. Make MFA mandatory for your employees if they’re accessing critical accounts when working from outside the office premises.

Password manager
A study from last year states that businesses access an average of 129 applications for their daily tasks. When employees work from remote locations, this number increases considerably. While these applications come in handy, maintaining and remembering strong passwords for each of these accounts can be cumbersome. Passwords are the first line of defense for any account and they should be secured at all costs. A proper password management solution like Zoho Vault will allow users to securely store, share, and manage passwords from anywhere.

Single sign-on (SSO) solutions
Many companies and experts prefer a password-less experience for their users. This is certainly achievable with an SSO solution that allows users to securely authenticate with multiple applications while just logging in once to an identity provider. This eliminates the need for creating individual user accounts, thereby increasing user productivity multifold while allowing IT admins to monitor all user access from one place. Lately, password managers also frequently bundle single sign-on services with their offering.

Secure backup mechanism
While the top priority is implementing solid security policies to prevent cyber incidents, it’s always essential to also have a reliable backup mechanism. Encrypting end-user devices and setting a periodic backup of daily tasks performed can safeguard your business when users lose their work device. This will help you restore all critical data, continue business operations without interruption and quell the worries of your data getting compromised.

Working remotely is definitely beneficial and safe when your workforce has access to advanced security tools that reduce the likeliness of a potential threat for your business. You can enjoy multiple benefits of a telecommuting policy, such as increased user productivity, employee loyalty, minimal attrition rate, and financial expenditure, among other benefits.

While this doesn’t cover the complete list of security concerns to keep in mind in situations like these, the basic security tips stated above should help you kickstart remote work at your enterprise and go mobile today without hesitation.