One of the biggest side effects of the current pandemic has been the rise in remote workers. In almost every industry, people are now spending more time working at home or flexibly between the home and the office than ever before, which has actually been revolutionary. Parents who have responsibility for their children are still able to maintain their careers while balancing their children at home. Those who have dealt with ableism from employers no longer have that as so much of a barrier because of the ability to work from home, and the pandemic proved it was possible.

Prior to the pandemic, remote workers weren’t really a thing because businesses would say they couldn’t do it and they couldn’t manage it. But the pandemic taught us that actually, when businesses are forced to bend, they will. While some people are choosing to move back into an office environment from working from home, there are still a good many people who are working remotely, but they need to be able to do so safely. This throws up quite a few questions for an employer such as is DuckDuckGo safe? How do I keep an eye on my workers while they are at home? How far do I extend trust to my team? There are certain questions that are important for an employer to be able to answer before saying yes to remote workers. So here are top tips for remote workers to work safely:

Image source: Pexels

• Use a VPN. A VPN is a Virtual Private Network and it helps to protect data that is used and keep user behavior secret when they are working. We just mentioned one: DuckDuckGo. It’s a VPN that will allow people to work from home behind a safety wall. When a user logs into the network, the device they are using is assigned a unique IP address. This allows a third party to access the data and identify it and without this kind of protection, sensitive data can’t be transferred online. The address of the Virtual Private Network is displayed instead, rather than the original IP address which keeps the employee safe. Of course, not everybody understands how VPN works, so some people may battle against the idea of downloading onto their computers, but they shouldn’t.
• Use a password manager to protect your information. It’s important to have a password manager if you are going to have people working from home. You and your employees need to be able to use reliable, long and difficult to guess passwords so that people are able to log in safely and stop information from being stolen. Complicated passwords can help that. If a password length is increased just by one, the number of possible passwords will double. Two-factor authentication and multi factor authentication can also help to strengthen this.
• Collaborate securely. When people are working remotely, most discussions and business meetings are held online, which means it’s important to use secure collaboration tools. Most companies will use video conferencing for meetings, which is very convenient because people can then see each other and it’s like having a conversation in person. There should be secure tools such as Zoom or Webex used for this so that the conversation remains private.
• Use a firewall. Using a good antivirus scanner, you can ensure that you install a reliable firewall on a computer or a smartphone. Security software, along with antiviral protection, is incredibly important when working from home. This is especially the case for PC’s and other devices that are used for work purposes. Alongside that antivirus scanner, you can install a firewall to ensure that your modern application is protected as much as possible.
• Relying on the cloud. Reliable cloud storage is important when working from home, but storage includes Live Drive, Google Drive, and Microsoft’s OneDrive. You could even use Dropbox as a reliable source for cloud storage. Cloud services are often hosted on servers that have a permanent Internet connection, and suppliers like you would rely on the trust of the user. If your company is then attacked, you will not lose your data and you’ll be able to recover it as you need to. Cloud security is a whole range of technologies and protocols, and you need it to be able to keep your business safe.
• Make sure that you are financially secure. If you have anybody accessing financial information or sensitive information at home as part of their job, then you should ensure that financial information is secure. Banks always have their own internal protection against those who are looking to commit fraud, but as a business, you need to rely on additional programs for accounting, tracking, and reporting. These will have protections built in that will not even allow the developers to access the data.

About the Author: Garlak Theodorakis

My name is Garlak Theodorakis, I am graphic designer with almost 10 year experience in the field. Founded Tooft.com in january 2010 with idea to share my knowledge with the world.