Don’t let security be a casualty of supporting remote workers

The ongoing pandemic is having a major impact on businesses this quarter and, by all accounts, is set to be a major challenge for enterprises throughout the rest of the financial year. The US CDC (Centre for Disease Control) hinted that it may be necessary to implement “social distancing measures”. At present, its official advice is that employees with symptoms should be encouraged to telework where possible and companies should prepare to have “the information technology and infrastructure needed to support multiple employees [working from home]”. Some large enterprises, IBM, Goldman Sachs, PwC, and Twitter among them have already gone a step further and preemptively instructed all employees to work remotely where possible.

In providing the infrastructure and support for large-scale teleworking, organisations need to prepare themselves and their employees for the increased cyber security risks such a shift can bring. In this post, we outline some of the challenges and best practices for staff suddenly faced with a transition from office-based work to remote work.

• Here’s our list of the best antivirus services on the market
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• Here’s our choice of the best VPN services of 2020

Physical security of company devices

First of all, it’s important to note that just because employees won’t be working from the office doesn’t mean they won’t travel or work in public places. When doing so, employees are exposing themselves to a greater risk of losing their laptops and all the data that resides locally.

Do – Ensure all devices that support it use full disk encryption. If a machine is lost, the data on the device should not be accessible to thieves.

Do – Implement robust password management for laptop access. All accounts on the device should require unique login credentials, and wher