As businesses and employees adopt remote and hybrid work arrangements, IT teams face a lingering concern: how to maintain security while allowing employees to work from anywhere?
Fortunately, remote work doesn’t require sacrificing security. With the right tools, tactics, and technology, remote teams and companies with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies can work from anywhere, on any device, while still maintaining security and IT compliance.
To help with that, we’ve compiled a work-from-home security checklist for businesses of all sizes. Following these ten simple steps will help ensure secure remote work across devices.
Cyber Risks in the Remote Work Landscape: Key Trends & Insights
First, it’s important to understand the threats that remote and distributed teams face. While many cyber threats can impact employees regardless of whether they’re in the office or working remotely, some threats are unique or pose a greater threat to remote workers.
Common cyber risks for remote teams include:
Personal device vulnerabilities: BYOD policies give employees the freedom to use the devices they prefer, but that comes with its own set of risks. Personal devices may not have the cybersecurity tools and protections they need, or may have skipped an important patch update, making the devices more vulnerable to attack and jeopardizing the sensitive data within.
Unsecured networks: Companies use secure Wi-Fi networks protected by firewalls, device authentication, and more. Employees working remotely, on the other hand, often connect to unsecured public Wi-Fi networks that pose security risks. Without the proper security measures and tools in place, connecting to those networks can create a security risk.
Lack of encryption: End-to-end encryption is vital for transmitting data and files, but not all personal devices and communications apps use encryption. Businesses must ensure employees are using secure, encrypted communication tools that protect data in transit.
Phishing attacks: While phishing attacks are common for all businesses, they can pose an increased threat to remote workers. If a remote employee falls for a phishing attack, they can put their personal and work accounts at risk, and repairing the device can be a greater challenge. As such, it’s essential to train employees on how to prevent phishing and what to do if they’re targeted.
10-Step Checklist: Work From Home Security
Fortunately, despite all these risks, it is possible to secure remote work environments and help employees work from anywhere safely. Following this work-from-home security checklist can help support secure remote work:
1. Keep Data Secure: Eliminate Local Storage to Reduce Risk
Consider where your data is stored. If employees keep all their work data on their personal devices, the data is more vulnerable to being stolen or damaged. However, if the data is stored on the company’s servers, which remote employees can access securely from their devices without downloading it, then it can be kept safe should a device be compromised.
2. Encrypt Remote Sessions
End-to-end encryption is crucial for ensuring the secure communication and transfer of data. Remote connections are a core part of remote access and support, as they share screens and controls between in-office and remote devices, but that data must be encrypted to ensure it stays safe from prying eyes. Encrypted remote sessions help keep data secure when in transit, so it’s a core part of remote work.
3. Enable Secure BYOD
BYOD policies are great for remote employees, as they enable them to work on the devices they prefer and are most comfortable with (as anyone with a position on “Mac vs PC” will tell you, that makes a big difference). However, without proper security measures, BYOD can create new risks and vulnerabilities. Businesses must implement BYOD policies that include strong security measures and tools to keep data and devices secure.
4. Apply Granular Policies
Managing permissions and access is another important aspect of secure remote work. Granular policy controls allow businesses to carefully manage who has access to what systems, tools, network segments, or data. This ensures that important information is kept safe from intruders or compromised accounts.
5. Ensure Full Endpoint Visibility
When employees work remotely, IT teams and managers should have full visibility into and control over remote endpoints. Full endpoint visibility helps ensure IT teams can identify suspicious behavior and warning signs of data breaches or other cyberattacks so they can address the issues as soon as they emerge and before other devices or networks can become infected.
6. Centralize Management
Even if your endpoints are distributed, your management shouldn’t be. Centralized management enables IT teams and managers to monitor and support all endpoints from a single location, making it easy to manage everything.
7. Automate Compliance
IT compliance is mandatory, especially in industries with strict regulatory requirements, such as GDPR or HIPAA compliance. Regulatory compliance should be built into your remote access and remote management tools, ensuring that you’re meeting all your requirements and maintaining security while working remotely.
8. Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for All Access
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the easiest ways to improve cybersecurity and verify users. With MFA, users attempting to log in confirm their identity and log in using a secondary source, such as an authentication app or email. This ensures that even if a user’s login credentials are stolen, there’s another layer of protection ensuring only they can log into their account.
9. Regularly Patch and Update All Systems
Keeping endpoints up to date is essential for security. Whenever a new vulnerability is discovered, prompt patching can help make sure it gets repaired quickly, which is required for cybersecurity and IT compliance. Regularly checking for updates and patches or using a solution with automated patch management can ensure devices remain up to date and secure whenever new updates are released.
10. Conduct Regular Security Awareness Training
Cybersecurity is a shared responsibility. Employees should be trained on the company’s security policies, best practices, responses to security incidents, and so on. This can often include tests to ensure employees know how to identify and avoid phishing emails, which helps demonstrate their awareness and preparedness.
Strategies for Building a Scalable & Secure Remote Work Environment
If you want to build a scalable, secure remote work environment, there are a few key strategies you can employ. These include:
Utilize flexible and adaptable solutions that can meet your varied remote work needs.
Find a platform that balances security, scalability, and user-friendliness.
Maintain a secure workspace with strong security features and tools.
Keep data encrypted and stored on the company server, not individual devices.
Use a solution that supports and can work across a wide array of devices and operating systems.
While the specific forms these take will vary between businesses and their individual needs, they’re nonetheless vital for any organization looking to build a secure and efficient remote work environment.
Empower Secure Remote Workflows with Splashtop’s Secure Remote Work Solutions
Remote access and support are vital for secure remote work, and if you want a powerful and scalable solution with advanced security, Splashtop has what you need.
Splashtop Remote Access makes remote work easy by enabling employees to access their work devices, including files, projects, and specialized tools, without storing anything on their personal devices. This empowers users to work from anywhere, on any device, at any time, as easily as if they were at their desks.
Additionally, Splashtop is built for security. Its advanced security features include multi-factor authentication, multi-level password security, remote connection notifications, session logs, and more. Splashtop doesn’t access or store information, but rather streams the screen across devices using end-to-end encryption.
For IT teams that want real-time patching, automated compliance visibility, and full endpoint oversight, Splashtop AEM (autonomous endpoint management) extends these same security principles across all devices—ensuring every endpoint in your remote fleet stays updated and protected.
Thanks to its security features, Splashtop meets a broad range of industry and government standards, including ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, and more. This has made Splashtop a secure choice for businesses across industries.
Ready to work from anywhere, on any device, without compromising cybersecurity? Try out a free trial of Splashtop and see why businesses rely on it for secure remote work:
