Do you remember the times when the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic came and people all over the world were enforced to stay at home? It was a huge shock for many of us, especially for those who had a strong habit to wake up every morning and go to the office.
Today nobody is surprised when he or she is asked to work from home. It has become a new reality. And even when the risk of getting infected has become lower, many companies have made a decision not to come back to offices. Moreover, many people are not going to return to offices and are even looking exclusively for those vacations that presuppose staying at home.
However, a remote work format has brought not only benefits. It has brought new issues and challenges as well. And one of them is the necessity to ensure a sufficient level of IoT security in the remote work era, especially given the fact that this format of work is likely to stay with us for the long term.
Even when people work in one location, sometimes it can be a real challenge to fully protect their devices and network connections from any external attacks. But when all employees are working from different corners of the city (or even from different continents), that’s already a very different story.
In this article, we’d like to share some tips that will help you to increase the level of IoT security. However, all of them will demonstrate a low level of efficiency if you have unreliable software and devices. That’s why the first point to pay attention to is the quality of the internet of things development and maintenance services that you use. But if you are sure that you have a good vendor that won’t let you down, it’s time to focus on other exciting concerns.
How can you protect your system when your team works remotely?
To address security vulnerabilities, you can:
- Pay attention to the collaboration tools that you use. Make sure that they provide secure data exchange and that all the sensitive information that you share using this software is safely stored;
- Utilize tech tools that can automatically detect and prevent any suspicious activities;
- Use only safe passwords, do not share them with third parties, and timely update them on a regular basis. Also, explain these rules to your employees;
- Educate your employees on the questions related to the risks associated with phishing scams that can take place via Zoom, Skype, or any other popular app that you typically use for communication.
Tell your employees about the key requirements for network security
When your team works in the office, your company’s management is responsible for introducing the most efficient security best practices. However, when all team members work from home, network security becomes their responsibility. That’s why it is vital to provide employees with sufficient information on what they can do for protecting their connections.
It is important to protect their routers, not to use network names and passwords that were set by default, and to update passwords once a couple of months.
Also, for business purposes, it is recommended to use a separate WiFi account. When you use your family account, the connection can be threatened because children or other family members can download malware by mistake on the common network.
It can be also very useful to use a VPN for replacing a real IP address with another one and encrypting all the data.
Explain the risks related to copying data
Very often employees do not fully realize the risks that can be associated with sending sensitive data via emails or copying valuable information to USB sticks. It is absolutely clear that such a way of storing data can be convenient for people, especially when they can work from home or from any other place. However, the risks are high.
We can recommend you offer your employees to use some digital services for organizing their remorse work. But you should check the reliability of these services beforehand.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, when your team works remotely you can’t control everything, even if you want to. And security vulnerabilities remain among the most alarming ones in this situation. Actually, there are three core things that you can do. The first one is the education of your employees on all the questions regarding risks and possible measures.
The second thing is continuous monitoring which will help you to detect all the threats timely so that you will have the possibility to react to them in such a way that will minimize further damages. And last but not least is the use of highly reliable communication and collaboration tools. This point greatly depends on your choice. That’s why, please, be very careful and attentive.