The concept of working from home, or remote work, has become more prevalent than ever before. While it offers convenience and flexibility, it also presents unique challenges, with one of the most pressing being the constant threat of cyberattacks. Cyber criminals are actively evolving their tactics to exploit vulnerabilities in remote work setups.
To safeguard your remote employees, it is crucial to ensure that their digital workspace is protected.
In this article, we will explore the significance of securing remote employees from cyber threat actors and provide actionable mitigation steps in an easily understandable format.
Why Protecting Remote Work Employees is Crucial
The shift to remote work has led to an increase in the attempts by cyber criminals to look for, and exploit vulnerabilities, thus making it imperative to safeguard your remote workforce.
While cloud computing comes to mind when discussing file storage and sharing, the fact still remains that a server computer may really be all a small business or organization needs to improve business and office productivity.
Can a server computer really help your business? So many small business owners seem to think otherwise. The argument is that the old converted Microsoft Windows desktop “server” computer sitting in a corner is doing just fine.
However, that is a disaster waiting to happen and it is bound to become a great drag on business and employee productivity. Server computers are built for storing data in a central location which ultimately saves everyone a lot of time, effort and stress. Think about it for a minute. With your corporate files in a central location, there is less need for your workers or users to try and figure out where a specific file is or who is currently using a specific document. Servers also make it very easy to collaborate on numerous projects and whenever someone updates a file, the new information is instantly available to all.
If your business or organization is still operating in a Peer-to-Peer network environment, you need a network server.
Peer-to-Peer or work-group systems do not provide much in the way of security, and resource sharing can be somewhat problematic. In addition, your organization and users will have problems accessing other workstations, could lose data due to virus or spyware infection, and will likely experience intermittent Internet connectivity problems.
Computers networked in a peer-to-peer fashion may be adequate when you only have a few users on the network, but once you have more then 5 or 6 users on your business network, your organization should really consider investing in a network server computer.
What Is A Server Computer?
A network server computer allows organizations to centralize administration, data backups, file storage, share printers and documents, and host databases.
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scene when you send an email, connect to a website or simply plug a new computer into your local network? I took a look recently, and I must say, machine language, basically, is no different from ours at some levels. When we hear the term machine language, we no doubt immediately think of 0s and 1s (zeros and ones) which is true, essentially. So how do computers know where to send information and that laptop you just connected to the network, how did it get its IP address so you can browse the network and surf the net? They do the same thing we do, they ask.
I had a client who was just getting killed by spammers. Every morning their inbox was loaded with junk mail and they had as much as five thousand (5,000) emails in their spam filter box when they came in. I decided to help them out with the free version of Astaro Security Gateway. We threw the software version (v7) on an old AMD box they had lying around – 2GHz processor, 20GB IDE drive, 512 RAM, two NICS. What a difference spam filtering at the perimeter of the network makes! The first week was like “wow”. Astaro actually generates a daily report and for email filtering we had 36,930 processed. Get this, out of that number, 36,832 was categorized as “Spam emails blocked”. And the live log was right there for us to see. Emails the system was not sure about were placed in quarantine and you have the option of having an admin view, release or delete those emails, or have a report sent to the affected user. The report even had a “Top 10 Spam Sender” entry with the IP addresses and countries of origin (little flags) of the bad guys. There was also a “Top 5 Spam Countries” entry on the report.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Monday the release of a DHS-developed detection tool that can be used by the federal government, commercial vendors, state and local governments, and critical infrastructure owners and operators to scan their networks for the Conficker/Downadup computer worm. According to the DHS The department’s United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team … Read more
Every small business owner has experienced it – the dizzying speed at which technology is evolving, the myriad of solutions out there, the outrageous cost of so-called “solutions” proffered by self-confessed experts, and the tendency to “In-Source” I.T. responsibilities to a technology-savvy employee who quickly becomes frustrated, overworked and under-utilized. The outcome of this scenario is the overwhelming number of small business environments with ill-maintained computer networks that are out of date in terms of security patches, backups, updates and a coherent licensing structure.
