The local network in your office is far more secure than the one found at your employee’s home. The reason for that being because local networks are built to be completely shut off from other networks – ensuring data from your company, stays in your company, both in a physical and virtual sense.
When you start to understand just how secure these networks are, you can also start to imagine some challenges that come up if your entire workforce needs to move out of your usual office or site.
Just how do you take work home if it’s built into a system where the main objective is keeping everything at the office?
3rd party applications
While remote server access is possible with a variety of 3rd party apps, there’s a severe lack of them which are secure, user-friendly, and that don’t have performance issues. When used in the medium to long term, these apps tend to cause more problems than they solve, wasting hours of productive work time and potentially decreasing revenues – particularly an issue since these applications can cost in the tens of thousands to set up.
Having a secured network, such as a VPN, connected to your on-premises infrastructure.
Cheap and cheerful, VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, have recently gained popularity with the general public as a way to ensure their personal data is secure when going about their usual digital activities. As it relates to work, VPNs can provide access to your company’s network files. Though even if you provide your staff with VPN access, a personal computer is a large variable and could still be compromised, which in turn would compromise company data.
There are ways, however, that you can reduce security risks if you choose to utilise a VPN for remote work. These include:
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- Ensuring you have proper measures to verify and authenticate employee login credentials
- Having a good firewall in place
- Setting up enforced time-outs for sensitive programs and applications
Difficulties doing these crucial steps tend to appear if your company doesn’t have the supports needed to facilitate these actions using your on-prem infrastructures – many of which are outdated and limitations on how much they can be customised for security – for example, implementing life cycle refreshes on some hardware is merely impossible.
Taking work devices home.
If it’s possible for employees to bring home their work devices, this mitigates the security concerns that come with personal devices. Create a ‘Remote Access Policy’ for employees so they are aware of how work-issued equipment should be treated when working remotely. By ensuring your employees’ homes are a safe environment for work from home, you can eliminate the risk of human error or potential cyber-security risks.
The caveat here is that sometimes it’s physically difficult, if not impossible, to move equipment from the office into each individual home.
As you can see, each of these solutions are all effective at addressing certain issues in the short term, but for many will only be a band-aid fix before more and more problems with security, productivity, and accessibility start to arise. Paired with the current uncertainty surrounding how long physical distancing measures, movement restrictions, and industry-wide shutdowns will be in place for, there’s only one option that covers your business for not only the “new normal” but also the increasingly digital future.
Migrate to a platform like Office 365.
This multi-factor authentication, multi-SaaS platform is more secure and complete than other cloud services. Communication systems between staff are going to be more important than ever before, so systems like Microsoft Teams will keep your employees connected, and accountable to their workloads.
Correct implementation of Office 365 is crucial, and in doing so you can save precious time and money down the track with work automation and improved efficiency.
While it’s all good to migrate to a new system, all of them do need to be managed – someone to administrate it and keep the house in order, not much different from the old days when someone managed the filing cabinet.
Leadinveck has a number of solutions that molds large software platforms like Office 365, to fit and cater to all your individual businesses’ needs, and can provide ongoing support and maintenance, leaving you with more time to focus on what you do best – running your business.
Contact us today to see how we can help.