Ways in Which You Can Ensure a More Secure Work from Home Experience

With the pandemic showing no signs of slowing down, working from home seems to be the new normal for most organizations. No one wants to risk commuting to work every day with the overhanging threat of being infected by the virus. Even with all the safety protocols in place and workplaces being sanitized aggressively, people are still falling sick, and the numbers are only rising every day.

Therefore, it is time that we made our peace with the fact that working from home is our new normal, and this is how it is going to be for a very long time. In fact, we do not know for sure if we shall ever be able to return to our workplaces anymore. However, a work-from-home setup comes with a number of challenges. There are technological impediments that can slow down anyone while they are working and cause glitches in the same. Therefore, working from home is not exactly an easy affair.

However, with the help of a few technological innovations and advances, some of these challenges can be sorted out, and the work-from-home setup can be refined and made more comfortable for employees. In this article, we shall look at a few of these advances and see how you can use them to ensure a more secure work-from-home experience.

Use Your Biometrics or Multi-Factor Authentication for Access to Your Work:

One of the best ways to add an extra layer of security to your work-from-home setup is by using multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication or MFA is a feature that allows only authorized users to access any controlled system. MFA ensures that your work files and software have lesser risks of being hacked into since it is protected by two levels of security.

Another way to secure your work system is by using biometrics to log into your accounts and software. You will need to feed in your fingerprints or get through retina scans to log into the system. Using biometrics to log into your work systems ensures that no one but you can access your files and software.

More often than not, while working from home, you might let your guards down and leave your system for other people to operate and perhaps even play games on. This can lead to the failure of the system and compromise security as well. However, biometrics and MFA ensure that no one else can operate on your system even while you are away.

Protect Your Personal and Financial Information with the Help of Automation:

The second way to use technological advances is by insulating your personal and financial information by using an automated system. This is incredibly important in a work-from-home setup for multiple reasons. With this kind of automation, you can protect your as well as your customer’s financial and personal information and prevent them from falling into the wrong hands.

For instance, while you deal with your customer for any payment, your customer can directly relay his financial information to an automated system. Once the payment is made, the customer can then get back to you. This way, you shall never know any part of the customer’s financial information.  

Check Whether Your Channels of Work Communication Are Encrypted:

Do not communicate with your employees and teammates via channels that are not end-to-end encrypted. This does not need saying, but many people still make the mistake of not looking for the mark of security on the channels they use for work communication. As a result, hackers can easily hack into these channels and steal sensitive information.

Team collaboration software and other tools of communication that you use while working from home, like the ones found here, must inform the users clearly about their encryption policies. If they do not have details regarding their encryption, you must ditch them at once and choose the ones that are safe and secure.

Also, check if the calls you make to employers and customers are encrypted too. More often than not, malicious third parties might keep tabs on these calls and use the information shared to their advantage. This shall leave you and your organization at the risk of security breaches. Therefore, make sure every channel of communication is secure and duly encrypted, especially while working from home.

Summing Up:

One cannot stress enough the importance of securing a work-from-home setup. Working from home might sound like a comfortable idea. But unless you use technology that can tweak the security of the work-from-home setup, you could find yourself in trouble.

Therefore, read through the points mentioned in the article, and learn to use technology to secure the systems that you use to work from home. Adding some extra layer of security to your work-from-home setup shall only help you work better and stay safe. Therefore, you might as well try doing the same.