One of the most significant benefits of internet is the new-found ability it has provided to businesses that enable them to create a decentralized architecture where the employers and employees are no longer bound by geographical constraints. This not only enables the enterprises to hire a developer from halfway across the globe, but the same liberty is also lent to the employees who don’t necessarily need to walk into the office every morning and can work at their convenience- from home or from their favorite café.
But there is one problem- security. Unlike in a typical office environment, where all the systems and data are constantly under scrutiny with much greater control, the decentralized system is difficult to manage due to multiple opportunities for potential data leakages.
Fortunately, there are ample technologies and techniques available, which when deployed can minimize, if not mitigate, these security risks. Here are five such measures you can take:
#1. Choose Cloud
The simplest solution you can choose for managing employees off-site is to deploy cloud. There is a host of services available in the market that offer from infrastructure to platform-as-a-service at reasonable costs. These services are known to stick to the highest security standards and deploy state-of-the-art technologies to keep your data secure; something that you can’t possibly manage for your personal servers. Also, these services often guarantee almost 100% up-time, which will be a big boost for pushing productivity.
#2. Go for VPN
Apart from data leakages at servers and application end, which you can solve by deploying cloud, data is most susceptible to hacking during transmission. To overcome this threat, you can leverage the power of VPNs, that will provide a secure channel for all the enterprise data. Especially, since you can’t guarantee the security of each network your employees may be using, it is always recommended that all of them use a VPN to connect to the company network. However, since VPNs are known to be a bit slower than other open networks, you should try and invest in a reliable and faster network to ensure the work doesn’t get interrupted.
#3. Custom Devices
If you provide your employees with company’s devices, it is a generally accepted norm to tweak them to include a few additional security features. Be it something as restricting as external hard drives or restrictions on certain file transfers, there are multiple security roadblocks you can create to ensure your data is not used for any unintended purposes.
#4. Authentication
So, what if someone stole that device? There is a seemingly simple solution for that as well. Instead of relying on a single credential to access enterprise applications, opt for two-factor authentication that confirms that even after some attacker gets hold of the device and the primary credentials, they still can’t access the data. From trivial methods like secret question to fingerprint authentication, there is a host of options available that you can choose depending on your convenience.
#5. Authorization
Now that you have secured the servers, the channel and the device such that no attacker can access the sensitive data., what will you do if your employee has malicious intentions? Though there is no foolproof solution to such problem, there are plenty of options available. The most common one used by enterprises is to limit their access to only the data that they need. Also, you can put additional restrictions like read-only to sensitive files that you do not wish to be transmitted.
