In March, when the stay-at-home orders first came down, and businesses started asking their employees to work from home, it was obvious that many of them were not prepared for this contingency. As the pandemic has gone on, however, businesses have had to adapt. Today, we thought we would look at some of the solutions and strategies that are being used by businesses to secure their endpoints with most of their workforce out of the office.
Virtual Private Networking
The VPN (Virtual Private Network) is one of the most useful tools for organizations who depend on people working remotely. The VPN establishes an encrypted connection between your business’ network and a remote endpoint. This allows people to send and receive information securely by passing it on via an intermediary network.
It can be confusing if you don’t know much about remote connections. It can also be a grind on your business’ network speeds. If your business doesn’t have enough bandwidth, data transmission over a VPN will be excruciatingly slow, and in some cases that will have an effect on the way your business works.
Fighting Phishing
Phishing is one of the biggest cybersecurity threats that the modern business has to guard against. This risk goes up significantly with workers accessing company resources remotely. There just isn’t the amount of control that there is when workers are in a central location. Today, there are endpoint protection solutions called Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) that can help control some of the risk inherent with people working remotely.
Even if you have the right tools in place, much of the responsibility for mitigating phishing risk is going to be on a business’ employees. Ensuring that they are trained about what to look out for is a big step in mitigating the risk from outside phishing threats. You will want to continuously test your employees to make sure that they are up to the task of keeping scammers from having access to company resources.
Threat Intelligence
People will make mistakes, however, so to ensure that you are ready if (and when) you do have to deal with cyber threats, many businesses are looking to threat intelligence tools. Your IT support team can really benefit from having a resource that helps them identify new threats as they come, because they are constantly evolving. Threat intelligence tools help keep your network and infrastructure protected from new threats as they develop.
Incident Response
Finally, if something were to happen, you need a way to quickly mitigate IT security problems. The EDR’s built-in incident response tool can help you determine how badly you’ve been breached and work to quarantine the impacted areas and resolve the threat. There are even options to help automate your anti-hacker efforts.
To keep your business running as intended in these difficult times, you need a coordinated effort. At Business Solutions & Software Group, we can help you by assessing your current situation and providing you with the tools you need to stay secure. Call us today at (954) 575-3992 to learn more.
