4 security practices for remote workforce

Employee search is becoming a problem in Hungary. According to recent research, it is becoming harder to find an appropriate candidate for an empty position and the search for every potential employee can take up to 3 weeks: all in all, it is a difficult, long and not always effective process.

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Hiring a remote workforce can be a solution to this problem. However, you need to consider some risks and challenges (especially connected with cyber threats) your company might face. That’s why it is important to create work conditions that would be both comfortable and safe for your remote employees.

In this article we will give you some recommendations on organizing remote access for your staff; if you are a representative of a Hungarian company that decided to increase the staffing with a remote workforce, it will come in handy.

Now, what are the main 4 security practices for the remote workforce?

1. Well-thought-out BYOD Security Policy

First of all, what is BYOD? BYOD meaning is Bring Your Own Device – it’s a set of rules that regulate the work of company personnel with their own equipment.

Remote employees use their own equipment for work. It leads to certain cyber security threats, such as:

• Worker`s device can be lost or stolen along with all the company information;
• Infected devices can harm other workers` devices through a shared network;
• Usage of jailbroken, rooted operation systems.

To avoid these risks you need to form your company’s BYOD policy properly.

Proper BYOD policy should contain the following points:

• Forbidding to use devices with jailbroken, rooted operation systems;
• Requiring strong passwords, time-out locking;
• Using company-provided anti-virus and protective software;
• Setting up protocols for reporting a lost or stolen device right away;
• Encouraging regular backups.
• Using two-factor authentication to access personal computers and all apps used for work.

2. Implement Cloud Storage and VPN

Besides the above-mentioned recommendations, for your corporate data safety, it is also beneficial to use cloud storage or VPN.

With remote work comes the risk of the employees to use the data from your company’s file servers from unsafe public networks. To avoid such problems you need to implement remote Virtual Private Network (VPN) access for your employees. One of the VPN tasks is encrypting the data to protect it from intruders. A VPN is also able to protect the network from viruses even better than firewalls, which often compromise data access.