Information warfare, spamming, hacking, financial thefts, and whatnot – the list of Cybercrimes, today, is long enough to cover the Great Wall of China in distasteful graffiti. And let’s face it, even though it has been over three decades of the world wide web, most of us still feel wary of putting personal and financial information up on the internet even for the simplest of purposes and the reason is the same everywhere – Virtual turpitude. Data protection become an important thing for all of us.
And if this is the situation of an individual, imagine the threat a businessman must feel about every transaction done online. The bigger the business, the bigger the fear of falling prey to the serious issues of the breach of data security.
Furthermore, this kind of trepidation is only heightened when you are dealing with a remote team because working remotely is all about the digital exchange of information and data, and the media channels are filled with reports of cybercrimes.
In such cases, it is crucial to take necessary safety measures to ensure that your data is safe. And if you are ready to take immediate action for that, read on.
Train your teams
A report by Cisco mentioned that 70% of data breaches in companies take place because employees used an external device or network. For reasons like this, it is crucial to properly orient and trains your employees about the company processes and policies.
Moreover, cloud services are one of the safest ways to go about communications and data exchange with a remote team, even during training. Using cloud services for data storage is also a better and safer option when you are working with remote teams.
Control the usage of public WiFi networks
Public WiFi networks are not only highly insecure and can be easily hacked, but they’re one of the primary means for hackers to violate any device’s security.
Instead of using public networks, you should promote the use of a cloud-based solution or a corporate VPN that delivers a security stack to keep your data safe against all the external WiFi networks.
In fact, to make things clearer, you can circulate a list of applications approved for use in public networks for maximum security.
Restrict the use of public computers
Usage of public computer devices even for the simplest of reasons can leave you vulnerable to a multitude of data security threats. Be it simply logging into the work email or downloading/uploading a file, you are never sure of what kind of malware that device must have been exposed to and how much harm it can do to your sensitive data.
Therefore, make it a hard rule that any non-approved device should not be used by your remote teams for any official work.
Practice Ring-fencing for extremely sensitive data
The practice of Ring-fencing allows the employees with access rights to locate certain data on different devices. With the help of ring-fencing, sensitive data can be split into multiple files and saved on numerous devices. And this data can only be accessible by certain individuals.
Since the files and data are divided, even if there is an unauthorized attempt to access one or some files, without the entire information, it will not make sense. Thus your sensitive data will be much more secure.
Put technology to use
For the benefit of your remote employees and for the safety and security of your data, adopt modern technology for connecting and collaborating for work. For instance,
- Google Drive and Dropbox for file sharing and data storing
- Trello for effective team management
- Virtual whiteboards or Realtimeboards for secure and easy collaborative working.
- Learning management systems for efficient training
As technology is becoming more sophisticated and complex, it is also becoming extremely easy to learn and use. Thus, using the right mix of tools for your teams (remote and otherwise) can improve data security and productivity alike.
And since absolute data security does not lean on any single solution, using a multifaceted approach for your teams will give you the best outcomes.
