Author: Robert Baird, CEO and President LOGIX Data Products Inc.

Are you or your employees working from home? Whether this is a new environment for you, or you have been doing it all along, there are some things to consider when working remotely.

You may find that you or your employees are now using personal devices to connect from home, or perhaps you’ve brought your work device home with you for the time being. Whatever the case, you should be asking yourself, what am I doing to protect this device? And what am I doing to protect my business network?

Setting up your device at home is only the first step. Once it is set up and working seamlessly, it is time to think about how you are going to protect it from external vulnerabilities.

 These vulnerabilities can come from:

1. Receiving both business and personal emails to the same device, increasing the chance of a phishing attack.
2. Clicking on social media advertisements or links that could lead to having personal information compromised.
3. Mixing business with pleasure; browsing sites that could have hidden threats during off-hours.
4. Not having proper safety policies implemented on a new device.
5. Opening a remote connection that could be hijacked by a criminal without even realizing.

To be clear, your employees are likely not intentionally practicing risky behaviour. Usually when a security breach happens, it is because the end user is uninformed of the dangers, and/or there is no dedicated team responsible for monitoring safety policies and ensuring they are being followed.

You may have had a staff member or IT professional performing consistent check ups on your computer a few months ago while everyone was working in an office environment. They would be in charge of ensuring updates are being installed correctly, consistent scans are being run to check your device’s health, performing real-time reporting against malware and other threats, and completing backups to complement your recovery point objectives. All of the things that we took for granted in the past may be overlooked in our new environments. 

The good news is that no matter where your employees are, or which device they are working on, there’s an easy way to make sure your business network (and by association your data) is protected. As we always say, it’s easier to prevent a data disaster than to recover from one.

It’s important to educate your employees about new security policies, and how to spot fraudulent activities such as email phishing attacks, and remote desktop scams. However, you cannot rely on anyone to be 100% secure 100% of the time, and that’s why you must use protection.