7 Things you Need to Secure Remote Offices

Increased Security Risks with Remote Workers in the “New Normal”

The need to have so many employees work from home creates new security risks. These risks used to be easy to ignore when most of your employees worked in the office, but those risks are now amplified. In this environment, businesses need secure remote offices that can:

• Support a large portion of our workers working from home
• Secure those workers as if they are working from the office
• Deal with prior security risks that were easy to ignore in the past, but now must be faced!

Top Security Risks for Remote Workers

Companies with remote workers should ask themselves these questions related to security.

• Is the at-home work infrastructure secure? Is the home network protected (including WiFi)? Are the home computers secured from malware, ransomware, data theft?  How about email phishing and CEO fraud?
• Can you guaranty that whoever is logging into your office network, cloud applications and cloud data centers are your authorized employees? Are ;you controlling their permissions?
• Are home office workers connections to work, data centers and cloud applications secure?
• Is your data secure when stored, in transit, and in-use?
• Do you know who is accessing your cloud-based applications like banking, payroll, HR, sales and marketing? Have you authorized them to use these applications? Are you controlling your data usage?

Top Security Goals to Support Work-from-Home Employees

Given the increased security risk of having workers work from home, these are the goals that companies should be focused on to secure remote offices.

• Secure our employee’s homes at the same high level as your office, since users need to access:
  • Office network, corporate data and applications
  • Company data centers

    

  • Cloud applications & application data
  • Company emails including email links
  • Home wireless network
• Implement a high level of security authentication for remote workers
• Provide secure handling of company data (access, storage, and usage) by employees
• Provide appropriate backup and disaster recovery for home users
• Provide security monitoring, alerting and remediation for remote users as well as HQ offices, remote data centers and cloud applications

Top 7 Solutions to Secure Remote Offices

Here are the top 7 security solutions for remote workers that companies should be deploying for their companies.  Depending on your company, these solutions may need to be deployed in different ways.

1. Home Office Security
   1. Home offices should have real firewalls (not just cable boxes or routers),
   2. Real endpoint security (not low end freeware, Windows defender) is required just like in the office
   3. Real corporate grade email security that protects against phishing, malicious web links, even CEO fraud is a necessity since mail is #1 threat vector
   4. Secure WiFi is critical at home.  With most computers connected wirelessly, unsecure wireless is a big issue.
2. MFA (Multi-factor Authentication)
   1. The need to authenticate your employees into your companies network, data and cloud applications in an easy-to-use way is essential.
3. Cloud Application Security (CASB+)
   1. The need to provide corporate visibility of which cloud applications are in use and how to control usage is essential.
4. Secure Communications (VPN)
   1. The need to secure communications from homes or traveling employees also essential. These tools come free with a good company firewall.
5. Data Security (Encrypt, Protect, DLP)
   1. Many companies don’t think about the need to secure data once it leaves the corporate database.  Good security says that you should make sure it is 1) secure in transport to and from the home, 2) secure as you work on it and 3) secure when it is stored (including controlling where you can store it).
6. Backup & Disaster Recovery
   1. Have you thought adequately about backing up with the ability to restore data now that employees are downloading and possibly storing data at their homes?
7. Security Monitoring (SIEM, MDR)
   1. With many of your employees now working from home you need to monitor 1) who is accessing resources, 2) what they are doing, and 3) any security threats.  Now more than ever we need to get our arms around the entire IT infrastructure.  It just got tougher.. are you ready?

eSecurity Solutions can help you navigate and evaluate the appropriate security solutions for your company. We can assess risks, evaluate regulation compliance or just help you define, implement and manage the right new solutions for this new work-at-home environment.

Contact us -we can help you secure your remote and home offices