Some things to keep in mind for work from home scenarios

Today, more and more business users are working from home than ever before. You save time by not having to travel as far from home to the office and use that travel time to be more efficient by getting more done at the office and/or spending more quality time with your family, spending more time caring for become healthier by going to the gym, or even spend more time at work because now you have more time to do it.

There are a few things that companies need to consider when allowing their employees to work from home, and one of them is IT security. Companies must ensure that employees communicate securely with the corporate office when working remotely (either from the employee’s home or from a coffee shop somewhere). One of the first suggestions is to ensure that business users connect with a virtual utility network tunnel to the corporate office. This creates a virtual, encrypted tunnel from your remote office or any other remote location. After that, all communications with the corporate office are encrypted and securely transferred through the tunnel. Corporate users can decide if they want to allow split tunneling or not.

Split tunneling is a feature of the virtual private network (VPN) tunnel and a business decision to send all traffic (including Internet traffic) through the tunnel to the corporate office. In this way, the users laptop is protected from accessing any unsafe and insecure internet sites. The company may also have a way to monitor and protect the traffic from that VPN tunnel so that if any viruses or malware are detected, they have a way to prevent them from infecting the entire network. However, there is a downside to this. The downside is that there will be much more traffic through the company network. So the company has to decide what is best in terms of priority.

If companies decide to allow split tunneling for remote users working from home, they should ensure that the users’ laptop has some security application installed, such as a firewall, antivirus, and anti-malware application enabled to detect and block, drop or prevent malicious attacks. traffic enters and infects others. There are several solutions for this and one method is to use Cisco AMP for Endpoints.

Today’s corporate end-gateway firewalls are much more sophisticated and perform some detection and policy checks when users connect to the office to ensure that laptops have all security features enabled and if not If so, users’ laptops are prompted to install anything that the laptop must comply with corporate security policy and standard. That way, there is no need to worry about the network being unprotected and insecure.

This is just one area that commercial companies need to think about when allowing remote users the freedom to work anywhere.