Today, more and more business users work from home. Save time by not having to travel so far from your home to the office and use that travel time to be more efficient by doing more things in the office and / or spending more quality time with your family, spending more time taking care of yourself yourself to be healthier by going to the gym, or even spending more time at work because now you have more time to do it.
There are a few things companies need to consider when allowing their employees to work from home, and one of them is IT security. Companies need to ensure that employees are securely communicating with the corporate office when working remotely (either from the employee’s home or from a coffee shop somewhere). One of the first suggestions is to ensure that business users connect with a virtual supply network tunnel to the corporate office. This creates a virtual and encrypted tunnel from your remote home office or from any other remote location. After that, all communications with the corporate office are encrypted and transferred securely through the tunnel. Corporate users can decide whether they want to allow split tunneling or not.
Split tunneling is a virtual private network (VPN) tunnel feature and a business decision to send all traffic (including Internet traffic) through the tunnel to the corporate office. In this way, users’ laptop is protected against accessing any unsafe and insecure internet site. The company may also have a way to monitor and protect the traffic on that VPN tunnel so that if any viruses or malware are detected, it has a way to prevent it from infecting the entire network. However, this has a downside. The downside is that there will be a lot more traffic through the corporate network. So the company has to decide what is best in terms of priority.
If companies decide to allow split tunneling for remote users working from home, they should ensure that users’ laptop has some security application installed such as firewall, antivirus and anti-malware application enabled to detect and block, remove or prevent malicious applications. traffic entering and infecting others. There are several solutions for this and one method is to use Cisco AMP for endpoints.
Today’s corporate gateway firewalls are much more sophisticated and do some detection and policy checks when users connect to the office to make sure laptops have all security features enabled and otherwise , the users laptop is requested to install anything that the laptop must comply with the corporate security policy and standard. That way, there is no need to worry about the network being unprotected and insecure.
This is just one area that commercial companies need to think about when allowing remote users the freedom to work anywhere.
