Remote and hybrid work have become essential aspects of businesses and work culture, enabling employees to efficiently work from anywhere and helping organizations expand their workforce across a wider geographic area. However, with the increase in remote work comes an increase in risks, as the growing cyber threats facing remote employees have necessitated a security-first culture for remote teams.
Businesses must balance the ease and convenience of remote work with their security needs; mobility and ease of access shouldn’t mean sacrificing cybersecurity (or vice versa). This means utilizing secure remote access software that helps employees work from anywhere while keeping intruders at bay.
With that in mind, let’s examine the risks and challenges remote teams face, how you can build a security culture for remote teams, and what Splashtop can do to enable secure remote work.
Understanding Security Risks in Remote Teams: Challenges & Threats
First, we must establish the importance of cybersecurity for remote teams. The need for strong security is consistent across businesses of all sizes and in every industry, as every company must protect its proprietary data, customer information, networks, users, and devices, especially if they must comply with industry or government security regulations.
Remote teams face a slew of security challenges, including:
Phishing: Phishing scams are among the most common cyberattacks, making up an estimated 22-36% of all data breaches. Both in-office and remote employees should be trained on how to prevent phishing, including what to do should they fall victim to one. Similarly, organizations should have contingencies in place for when a remote employee’s account is compromised.
Unsecured networks: Employees on the go often rely on public Wi-Fi networks, but those can be insecure and vulnerable to attacks. Strong security features are essential to let employees connect without jeopardizing their security.
Malware: In BYOD and remote environments, employees often use the same devices for work and personal use. In these instances, if an employee’s personal device is infected with malware, it can put their work account and credentials at risk.
Human error: Sometimes employees can make small mistakes with big consequences. It may be a simple matter of reusing passwords or having a weak, guessable password that hackers can exploit. Other times, they may accidentally expose sensitive information or download a file with a virus. Regardless of the cause, these mistakes can have severe consequences, so it’s important to train employees to avoid these mistakes and have security measures in place to avert them.
5 Key Strategies for Building a Secure Remote Work Culture
Building a strong, secure remote work culture requires more than giving everyone a laptop and letting them work from home. To support a secure, efficient, and motivated remote workforce, you can follow these key strategies:
1. Set Clear Remote Work Expectations and Policies
First and foremost, employees should understand your remote work policies, including the security tools and best practices they’ll need to use to ensure data and devices remain safe.
This also requires setting expectations for employee availability (while maintaining a work-life balance), the tools and technology at their disposal, BYOD policies, and so on. Setting clear expectations puts everyone on the same page when starting remote work.
2. Choose a Secure Remote Access Solution
Having the right software for secure remote access is essential. You need to find a platform that enables employees to access their work devices, software, and specialized tools from anywhere while keeping intruders and unauthorized users at bay.
Splashtop, for instance, is designed with security in mind and features a wide array of security features, including multi-factor authentication, remote connection notifications, logging, end-to-end encryption, and more. This makes Splashtop compliant with multiple industry and government security regulations, including GDPR, ISO/IEC 27001, and SOC 2.
3. Foster Communication and Collaboration
Employee isolation is one of the biggest challenges of remote work. Without tools for communication and remote collaboration, employees can struggle to stay connected with their coworkers and keep up with their work. As such, it’s important to encourage communication, including transparency in decision-making, virtual team building activities, and tools that enable employees to collaborate on projects when working remotely.
4. Recognize and Reward Employees
On a similar note, it can be easy for employees to feel overlooked and disconnected when working remotely. Recognizing everyone’s contributions and rewarding employees for their successes helps employee satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment, keeping morale high when employees are on the go, and preventing disaffection from growing.
5. Invest in Remote Support
Remote employees need IT support as much as in-office workers, and IT agents should also be able to work from anywhere. Enabling remote support capabilities helps ensure a secure and efficient remote work environment, as it enables IT teams to support and assist end users from anywhere, on any device.
As a result, IT agents can quickly assist employees without needing to travel to meet them in person, and can work remotely with the same ease as everyone else.
How Remote Teams Can Effectively Handle Security Breaches
What do you do when the worst happens, and a security breach puts your data and network at risk? Having strategies in place can help mitigate damage and ensure a speedy recovery, including:
Implementing immediate response protocols and breach containment helps ensure that breaches are addressed immediately, rather than giving them time to inflict more damage. This minimizes both the time attackers have and reduces the area affected, keeping the impact at a minimum.
Regular security training helps ensure that all employees are not only trained on cybersecurity best practices, but also know what to do in the event of a data breach so they can react quickly.
Establishing an incident response plan helps provide clear instructions on how to respond to breaches, so everyone knows their responsibilities and can quickly protect their data, mitigate the damage, and begin repairs.
Creating backups regularly helps ensure important and sensitive data can be recovered in the event of a breach or other disaster.
Secure Your Remote Work Environment with Splashtop: Start Your Free Trial Today!
Secure remote work requires the right tools, including remote access and support solutions that can meet your IT compliance requirements and empower employees to work from anywhere without compromising security. Fortunately, Splashtop provides all that and more.
Splashtop enables secure remote work by letting users connect to their work devices from any device, anywhere, with advanced security features to keep accounts and data safe. This gives remote workers full access to all their projects, tools, and programs wherever they go, so they can continue to work, collaborate on projects, and communicate uninterrupted.
This extends to IT teams as well, as Splashtop’s remote support tools let IT agents remotely access end users’ devices when they’re on the go and across devices. This enables remote support and troubleshooting, so they can assist employees as-needed, as easily as if the remote device were in front of them.
Splashtop is designed to meet a wide array of security regulations, providing secure remote access from anywhere. All sessions are protected with TLS and 256-bit AES encryption.
Ready for truly secure remote work? Get started with a free trial of Splashtop today and see how easy it is.
