6 Way to Secure Remote Access for Your Organization

Want to learn everything about remote access security solutions? Read on to learn more.

The pandemic forced hundreds and millions of employees and organisations to take their workplaces to their homes in early 2020. And even today, as the restrictions are beginning to cease—many organisations continue to work remotely in some capacities.

According to the PwC Survey—78% out of 669 surveyed CEOs say that the remote working environment is a long-term prospect.

Hence, organisations need a secure and robust solution to ensure secure remote access to manage complex remote and hybrid workflow, ensure employee productivity, and efficiently fight against cybersecurity attacks and online threats.

This blog shares the top six ways to ensure secure remote access for your organisation and its network. But first, let’s learn the importance of implementing secure remote access.

What is the Importance of Secure Remote Access?

The remote working environment presents new threats and vulnerabilities to the organisation’s network.

For instance, people working from remote locations use their own laptops and personal devices to access the company’s resources. Such employees’ reliance on routers and personal devices that could be infected with viruses or malware—opens risks and security threats for your network.

Moreover, they may use public internet connections to access the network or share sensitive files and data—which may be prone and vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks and eavesdropping.

Thus, these reasons make it imperative to implement a secure remote access solution security for your organisation.

Top 6 Ways To Secure Remote Access For Your Company

Secure remote network access is important to prevent unauthenticated and unauthorised access to your company network and prevent data breaches and other online threats.

Here are the top six best practices to ensure secure remote access for high security and data protection.

Opt for secure software

You should choose and go for enterprise-grade software to ensure maximum network security.

Some examples include desktop sharing, remote access VPN, or direc]t application access to eliminate data breaches and reduce cybersecurity risks.

Formalise cybersecurity policies for remote employees

You must have a set of cybersecurity policies for each remote employee to ensure secure data access and prevent your employees from being entry points for cyberattackers to hack into your systems and network.

You can implement policies such as regularly updating antimalware and antivirus software, patching and updating the company’s security schedules, approving messaging programs with proper encryption, and security protocols on wiping remote devices, if stolen or lost.

You can also implement Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for third-party vendors—making them adhere to your organisation’s security policies.

Use Multi-Factor Authentication and strong passwords

Using strong, long, and complicated passwords is important for security devices and user endpoints.

Weak or old passwords are common reasons for cybersecurity attacks and online threats. Thus, it’s important to educate and encourage employees to use strong passwords and update them regularly to eliminate remote access security issues.

Moreover, it’s also critical to use Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) for secure remote access.

Restrict access to necessary resources

It’s crucial to implement the least privileged access to provide secure remote access to users to specific resources instead of the entire network.

Suppose an employee doesn’t have a legitimate need or purpose for accessing a particular resource or network application. In that case, he shouldn’t be able to access them and instead only access the resources they require for their work.

Implement data encryption

Many remote access solutions create an encrypted end-to-end tunnel to carry forward the communications payload.

You should also encrypt the data payload for more robust security.

Inspect network traffic continuously

Implementing a mechanism to continuously monitor the network traffic for anomalous behaviour and threats is recommended.

Moreover, even if the threat exists, auto-remediation should immediately isolate or terminate the connection for better security.

Conclusion

Ensuring secure remote system access is important to enabling remote employees to securely access the network and its resources and protect your company’s network and sensitive data against data breaches and online attacks.

We hope this article helped you understand remote access security issues and the different ways you can enable secure remote access for your organization.