With the coronavirus pandemic affecting the world unexpectedly, we’ve been seeing countries closing borders, factories shutting down and companies extending work from home policies to their teams. According to a survey, conducted by Willis Towers Watson, 46% of American businesses have implemented remote work policy as early as February 2020. While telecommuting does make sense and working remotely protects employees from contracting and transmitting the virus, a distributed workplace comes with a learning curve and its own set of challenges. 

How do you protect your corporate data, devices and networks? How do you minimize phishing scams and cybersecurity threats? Where is the guarantee that your company devices won’t get affected by unauthorized users and that only secure networks are being utilized for remote work? Here are three tips we suggest to ensure your network doesn’t get compromised in the face of a distributed workforce.  

 

Antiphishing 

Since the onset of the pandemic, pandemic-related phishing attacks have increased a significant amount. Bad actors are capitalizing on current events in an attempt to successfully fool company employees into giving up valubable data. Be sure that your employee’s devices and email attachments are set to have all stored data encrypted to prevent theft. Don’t respond to emails from unrecognized senders that seek internal company information. Report any suspicious email activity to your digital security department. Above all, implement and maintain procedures that protect users’ confidential information and have back up measures in place so your systems are ready to be restored in case of emergency.  

Learn more about email security and policy-based encryption here

 

Security Awareness Training  

Even if your recovery strategy is up-to-date, not communicating security procedures and missing out on employee preparedness can be detrimental to your business operations. It’s always better to prepare your team by educating them about phishing attacks and cybersecurity threats than allowing them to click on a phishing email and cause a breach. Security should be top of mind when deploying work from home. Arming your employees with training resources that teach them how to work from home safely, is the single best thing you can do to protect your company infrastructure from unwanted threats.  

Contact us today to learn more about our awareness training resource library. 

 

Home Network Protection  

As a part of security awareness training, it is now more important than ever to train your employees and teams on how to protect company software and devices when working remotely. People working from home should avoid the use of public Wi-Fi. They should also make sure that their home routers and devices are sufficiently secured. VPN deployment, latest anti-virus software and end-to-end encryption provide an additional security layer needed to keep your systems running safely. Lastly, we recommend taking deliberate, proactive measures to ensure data-security like enforcing local data encryption and hardening cloud applications like Microsoft 365 

Learn more about advanced protection technologies offered by Atris 

Bottom line, your people are your greatest asset and right now they are likely to be under a great deal of stress, so offering a protected work environment free from cybersecurity threats will help everyone power through the tough times and perform their daily responsibilities safely and efficiently.