Keeping sensitive information safe is a difficulty for numerous employers and employees. Hackers are becoming ever-more sophisticated, and in doing so they are finding more and more vulnerabilities in which to target. One such vulnerability is the unseen weaknesses of remote working.
This is a practice that has become commonplace in the digital age. Indeed, a study by the International Workplace Group found that 50% of employees across the world work as much as two and a half days a week away from their office space. Yet it creates some difficulties for data protection. Large-scale remote working within a company can make cyber security more problematic, as the culmination of various networks and systems used for said work becomes larger.
Remote working is now such an industry-standard practice that efforts to reverse its popularity are unrealistic. Thus, in an attempt to combat the above issues, many experts recommend companies move their work applications to the cloud. This is so work data remains on company servers regardless of wherever staff are located.
A result of this is that so-called ‘traditional’ digital security protocols are no longer effective. This means going forward, businesses will have to monitor who has access to specific data, as well as the length of time that they can reach said data for. Say an employee leaves a certain task, access to that data must be rescinded quickly. Staying on top of your data’s restrictions is as an effective an action as you can take to protect against the cyber security risks created by remote working.
What can employees do?
From an employer’s perspective, one of the simplest but most essential practices to heighten cyber security is to alert workers to the usual sources of poor data protection. This includes education on weak password practices, as well as encouraging the use of two-factor authentication to company data. In addition, employees must be disincentivised from using their own personal systems instead of the company’s for work. This also means businesses need to ensure that their internal systems are accessible and intuitive for their employees, in order to maximise their cyber security.
