How to Protect Remote Workers from Cyber Attacks

As the business world moves increasingly online, the potential damage caused by cyber-attacks has grown exponentially. It feels like attacks can come from anywhere, without any warning – a hastily opened email, an accidentally-clicked link, an unsecured website – and it’s hard to know how to protect your company. If you have employees working remotely, these problems can increase tenfold. With staff working from their own homes, potentially from their own laptops, how on earth can you keep your company secure?

Provide Work Hardware

If your business deals with any form of sensitive information, security needs to be a priority. It may feel like an expense, but making sure to provide your employees with dedicated work computers is one of the best steps you can take towards keeping your company safe. This will ensure that your business sites and accounts do not get contaminated with any weaknesses that could spring from your employees’ personal emails or accounts. It gives you a greater level of control over privacy, and control is key when it comes to ensuring your business is safe from cyber-attacks.

Provide Software

Alongside hardware – or whilst you are waiting for hardware to arrive – providing a unified security software across every element of your business is an essential task. Do not go for a simple service here, but research software that is dedicated to business security. This will often be a lot stronger than personal antivirus software, as those trying to hack into businesses are often doing so with more resources than a common household virus. You also shouldn’t stop at antivirus programs; malicious attacks can come in different forms, and an anti-phishing service (such as Graphus – no affiliation) will be equally as important in protecting your email services from unwanted attention.

Remote IT Support

Alongside hardware and software, it is important to plan for every eventuality, including breakdowns, connectivity issues, and potential breaches. Regardless of the quality of your defense systems, there is always a risk that someone will manage to bypass them, and you need to be ready to respond in case this happens. Of course, you probably don’t have the necessary skills personally to deal with any breaches. This is why it is vital to invest in remote IT support for your employees, ideally a service that operates 24/7 and will allow you to relax and know you are in safe hands at all times. 

Institute Workplace Rules

Providing hardware, software and support can only go so far. You will also need your employees themselves to stay vigilant and alert to any potential breaches in security. A few simple rules can really help to create a culture of care that will protect your business as much as possible. Rules could include employees being forbidden from accessing personal emails on work computers, a requirement for them to work in places where they cannot be overlooked, and requiring employees to run regular virus scans of their work computers, perhaps logging the results in a company spreadsheet each week. All these conditions will work together to protect your remote workers and therefore your company from any cyber attacks, from any direction.

This is a contributed post.