Organizations and companies of all sizes have started adopting work-from-home practices. However, with these work-from-home policies in place, your customers could face an increase in attacks that could lead to data breaches. It’s vital that both employees and organizations take proper precautions to limit this risk and monitor, react and contain any sign of intrusion within corporate networks and compromise of employee endpoints.

Top 5 Security Risks in a Work-from-Home Environment:

1. Not being able to support a large number of simultaneous VPN connections.
2. Not properly implementing access, authorization and authentication policies which may result in employees accessing resources that they shouldn’t normally have access to.
3. Make it clear which VPN clients, services and applications are supported by the organization.
4. Gradual roll-out of procedures should be put in place for your customers that have a strict IT policy for centrally managing and deploying software and security updates to endpoints.
5. Enabling disk encryption for all endpoints as it minimizes the risk of having sensitive data accessed or compromised due to device theft.

Best Practices for Your Customers when Deciding to Enforce Work-from-Home Policies:

1. Deploy a security solution that features strong web security protection on employee endpoints.
2. Implement strong anti-phishing and network attack defense technology that can accurately detect and block such threats from preying on employees who work from home.
3. Bump up the number of simultaneous VPN connections to accommodate all remote employees.
4. Set up and support conferencing software that ensures a stable voice and video connection.
5. Make sure that all employees have valid Active Directory credentials that will not expire in less than 30 days.
6. Send out rules and guidelines regarding accepted applications and collaborative platforms.
7. Deploy network security, monitoring and logging tools so that IT and security teams can be notified whenever untrusted connections or unauthorized applications are spotted, in order to quickly block them.

What if your customers’ internal IT and security teams are overburdened and overworked? Have they considered outsourcing IT from MSPs? This can be a more effective approach! Click here to learn more about Bitdefender.