How to work from home AND stop your company’s data from leaking
April 3rd, 2020
The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has triggered global efforts to mitigate its massive impact on every aspect of society. For small and medium businesses, however, resource constraints amplify the challenges faced in confronting this unprecedented crisis.
Many small and medium business owners, executives and IT managers are being forced to respond to the evolving impact of COVID-19 on the global economic outlook, national public health guidelines, local Internet infrastructure and corporate network access policy. In several cases, key staff are working from home, in compliance with compulsory shelter-in-place policies, designed to mitigate the pandemic transmission rate. These disruptions are exposing vulnerabilities in organisations’ policies and systems critical to business continuity and service delivery.
With so many workers logging into remotely, the relationship between IT departments and business leaders is paramount, and the protection of corporate data is critical. But how can business leaders know that their company’s sensitive or proprietary data remains confidential, while giving expanded access to virtual offices and remote workers?
One important part of the solution is Data Loss Prevention, commonly referred to as DLP. With an increasing number of staff members now being onboarded to remote access systems, the security and resilience of your corporate networks is, more than ever, a collective responsibility. A comprehensive policy on data loss prevention should be developed, circulated and where necessary, follow-up training should be conducted, to ensure that both enforcement by managers and compliance by users are optimised.
For example, Microsoft Exchange allows organisations to set up significant Data Loss Prevention features, such as preventing users from sharing confidential information, warning managers of incidents and breaches, inserting approval requests into existing workflows, and granting superusers override authority.
“The specific definition of what is confidential information can be established at the top levels of the organisation, and it could include sensitive and personally identifiable information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, personal and company banking details, and any confidential documents stored on company devices or servers,” said Jasper Kraak, Solution Architect at Inova.
In January, we took an honest look at why we want to eliminate our internal email at Inova. In February, we shared some practical ways you can tell if your team is using your collaboration tools optimally. In March, we focused on how you can optimise your Sales Team. To get our newsletter, filled with more expert perspectives on technology adoption for your small or medium enterprise, subscribe here!
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