6 Key Considerations for Secure Remote Access to Employees

The traditional office culture made it easier for organizations to secure their corporate data, monitor their employees’ performance and manage their device inventory. However, ever since the world has experienced a radical shift towards remote working, organizations are confused with creating the right environment for their remote employees in terms of security and operational excellence.

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Allowing employees to work remotely requires enterprises to step out of their way to ensure enterprise data protection edp. Businesses worldwide are seeking tools such as Employee Monitoring Software, Remote Management Tools, Remote Access Software, etc. to simplify performance tracking, and remote deployments and deliver secure remote access to employees without overburdening the organization’s IT team.

What is Remote Access?

Remote Access is the ability of the employees of an organization to access business resources, IT services and corporate networks from beyond office premises, anywhere in the world and at any time. According to a report, a study suggests that 73 percent of all departments will have remote workers by 2028. To deploy a large-scale and secure remote work environment, businesses must figure out a way to enable secure remote access to their employees.

When your remote employees have access to all the corporate information and tools regardless of their locations, it helps them deliver better results and drive greater productivity. So why are businesses concerned about allowing remote access to their employees despite the benefits?

While the importance of allowing remote access to employees is clear, deploying secure remote access is not a cakewalk. Allowing remote employees to access the corporate data and network beyond the office facilities poses greats risks to data loss. Businesses face severe consequences of data breaches such as regulatory fines, legal actions, loss of brand reputation, decreased customer loyalty, etc. if they’re unable to protect their corporate information.

Moreover, having a useful user provisioning strategy can become essential for making the process easier to manage accounts and profiles, avoiding any further challenges remote teams face. Incorporating the best practices for user provisioning reduces security breaches and the impact of human errors, increasing operational efficiency.

Challenges in Allowing Remote Access to Employees:

• Device and Endpoint Security
  Remote working involves the usage of diverse types of mobile devices connected to the corporate network via the Internet. As the corporate world explores the various possibilities of remote working, newer work trends are surfacing. In addition to company-owned devices, businesses are allowing their employees to use their personal devices or BYO devices for work too.

As great as it is to help boost operational efficiency and keep the workforce connected from multiple places in the world, securing multitudes of devices that are functioning from dispersed locations becomes a cumbersome task for the organization’s IT admins. With BYOD management comes the responsibility of managing and securing different types of devices, belonging to diverse OS, depending on what the employees use.

• Data Protection

Keeping the corporate data confidential and well-secured is easily achievable in confined office spaces. However, with remote working, providing corporate access to all the employees of the organization to operate with the company’s information has a huge risk of data loss.

Within office facilities, the corporate devices and the data on them are within the organization’s visibility and control. When employees access sensitive business information remotely, they are prone to a number of security hazards such as device loss, device theft, connecting to unsecured networks, accidental malware infiltration through untrusted websites or phishing emails and much more.

• Heavy Deployment Costs

Deploying organization-wide remote access to the employees is not an easy task. It requires businesses to make large investments in purchasing hardware for all the employees, provisioning and securing the devices with one or more software solutions, additional data costs, as well as the maintenance, repairs and renewals of these products and services. Businesses also have to spend time and effort monitoring and training the remote workforce for proper usage of the devices and the data on them. When taking up coaching, it is advisable to keep everything organized and professional with a coaching contract.

• Overburdened IT

Deploying thousands of devices at diverse remote locations and provisioning them with enterprise-specific security policies, ensuring secure remote access and constantly monitoring the organization-wide inventory is a tedious IT task. IT admins generally have an exhaustive routine in maintaining and securing corporate networks, devices and information and keeping all the systems and processes up to date. Adopting enterprise mobility and enabling remote access to employees makes these processes more vulnerable and the IT team’s job more complicated.

6 Key Elements for a Secure Remote Access

To ensure that your business gets the best out of workplace flexibility, it is important to consider certain aspects that can reinforce the security of your remote access. Let’s look at 6 key elements that you must have to empower your employees to work securely from anywhere.

• Network Security
  Network security is one of the most crucial aspects of remote working. Since all processes, communication and information exchange takes place majorly via the internet, it is critical for businesses to ensure that their employees connect to secure networks and use trusted WiFi only. Configuring VPN from any of the top VPN providers to ensure encrypted network connection, deploying firewalls and anti-virus protection to ensure prevention from lurking malware and related cyber threats is of prime importance.

• Password Management
  The most basic, yet most effective method that acts as the first line of defense, is to protect the employees’ devices with strong passwords. Employees generally take device passwords lightly and use repetitive passwords that can be easily decoded. Enforcing passcode policies on an organization-wide level is an effective way to ensure that your remote employees have strong password for their devices to prevent device misuse and data loss.
   
• Data Encryption
  Remote work does not always mean working from home. There are several frontline industrial sectors that have employees working on-field and at different working sites such as construction, mining, warehousing, logistics, etc. These employees operate from rugged terrains and are constantly on the move. Mobile devices being of compact nature are prone to be lost or stolen. In such as case, having a backup plan to secure your corporate data saves the day. Data encryption is one such method that helps you to encrypt the data in a coded format that can only be decrypted with authorization.
   
• Zero-Trust Approach
  The Zero-trust security model goes by its name and works on the principle of “never trust, always verify”. This security model helps businesses secure their remote access to their corporate resources, as the framework restricts access and requires user authentication and multiple verifications from everyone, at each step. Organizations that adopt the Zero-trust approach can defend themselves from potential phishing attacks, compromised passwords and credentials to prevent data breaches, monitor compliances better and gain wider visibility into users, devices and the corporate network.
   
• Building Cybersecurity Policies
  It is important for businesses to create efficient security policies that can be deployed on their employees’ devices to minimize the risk of invasions and data loss. Modern-day remote management platforms such as Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions help businesses configure a variety of security policies such as data loss prevention (DLP) policies, remote data wipe, factory reset protection (FRP), and much more.
   
• Employee Training
  A business can achieve successful enterprise mobility when the efforts are made from both ends, the employers as well as the employees. Many a time employees are not tech-savvy enough to understand the consequences of their minor actions. Educating your employees about remote working and safe device usage best practices is a crucial element, besides the implementation of the above-mentioned strategies. You can train them online when the meeting is held remotely as this way it will be more accessible to everyone.

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Closing Lines

With more businesses going remote every day and even more devices connecting to various corporate networks to access and exchange critical information remotely, it is the need of the hour for enterprises to offer their employees secure access to their resources. Remote Access software is a way to allow employees to access remote servers and corporate networks. Several businesses are also showing immense trust in MDM solutions that offer enterprises versatile security controls to protect their corporate data through a single comprehensive platform.