Chances are that you, like most business owners, have assembled your staff very carefully, looking for people who are the best-in-class, willing to work their hardest for the good of the company. However, this staff will be made up of humans, and will therefore make mistakes. As such, you need to make sure that your data is managed in a way that keeps it safe.
Are you confident that you know where your company’s data is currently stored?
Unfortunately, if you are relying on your eager, diligent staff to allow you to answer “yes” to that question, then you may be answering incorrectly for the right reasons.
The thing about diligent employees is that, well, they’re diligent. They want to get the task at hand done to the best of their ability and as quickly as possible--and if that means they have to work from home, then that\'s what they’re going to want to do. Which wouldn’t be a problem, if their home networks were nearly as secure as the ones you have in place at your business.
What’s to be done? You don’t want to discourage your more diligent employees, but you also want to make sure your data is safe.
The easy answer is to meet employees like these halfway. Give them access to a Virtual Private Network to help maximize their security as they access your data remotely. Ask them to have their personal devices checked by IT before they use them to access the network. Ask them if they’re willing to allow IT to remotely wipe their personal device if it should be lost or compromised as a precaution, if they were to be able to use it for work. An established Bring Your Own Device policy will make enforcing this requirement a little easier.
Of course, this does not mean that you should give all employees carte blanche access to all of your data. Network access control solutions are an effective way to restrict your employees from accessing data that is above their pay grade, either intentionally or by accident. Requiring authentication has become the norm in most of society, and so your loyal employees are unlikely to have a problem with it in the workplace. Passwords, PIN access, and other identification factors will prove useful in keeping employees where they are supposed to be, and able to access what they need for their job requirements.
The reason that it is so important to allow your employees to work as they wish is because it will allow them to be productive, without resorting to their own methods outside of company control, which are far less secure than what you have implemented.
For help implementing these features into your IT infrastructure, make sure you give Evolve IT a call. We have the solutions you need to safely allow your enthusiastic employees to work the way they work best. Give us a call at (518) 203-2110 today.
