Working on the move is becoming increasingly common, and organisations are responding to the need to provide a remote working solution for employees. Remote email and desktop access are solutions to this but all come with their own problems. However, with a small amount of careful thinking it’s easy to reduce the likelihood of unauthorised access and breaches of privacy and make sure everything is safe that needs to be.
Your company should have already thought about the security of the way it provides mobile working , and it should therefore have already secured the network with a firewall, for example, but what steps can be taken to make sure that files stay as secure as possible? Strong passwords are the most important starting block and creating a strong password can help to limit security issues. This should include a combination of upper and lower case letters, and numbers. There are more hi-tech options available too, biometrics, for example, are up and coming, using finger print scanners to access a computer, though it might be a while before only those with documented fingerprints can access certain documents. If you are working on a public Wi-Fi connection, in a café for example, can you be 100% sure that it has been properly secured? This year’s Norton Cybercrime Reportfound that 2/3 of adults use free or unsecured public Wi-Fi, where details are easily prone to being intercepted. Are you part of that majority? A phone conversation about work or editing a document on the train could give confidential data away. Have you ever thought about who might be looking over your shoulder whilst you’re working in a public place?Chances are it’s nothing highly confidential, but we should all take a minute to think about what we can change about our mobile working habits to ensure information is kept secure.
- Check the security of your Wi-Fi connection. If you’re unsure, don’t use it, or use a product such as Norton Hotspot Privacy to create a personal VPN
- Think about the confidentiality of the documents you’re working on. Should the person next to you be allowed to scan its contents?
- When working in a browser, check that the web address begins with ‘https://’ and that there is a padlock symbol showing
- Always log out when working remotely
- Don’t store sensitive info on remote devices that could be easily misplaced
- Never click ‘remember me on this computer’ when using public Wi-Fi or a computer that isn’t yours