Security Concerns around Remote Employees

In the cloud-based economy, businesses of every size are hiring remote employees. Remote employees may decrease their capital costs, free the business from location limitations, and provide many of the intangible benefits of remote working. The increased number of employees working from diverse locations on a growing number of devices create several issues a business should consider.

If you are considering hiring and managing remote employees, you should consider increased security concerns as well as traditional HR issues. Security concerns around remote employees include password management, personal and business data management, meeting government regulations, and plans for great communication.

Passwords

This is an important part of employee management. Password managers like these outlined in PC Mag are essential parts of your employee management plan. Since people cannot remember truly complex passwords, and typing in a plethora of passwords is enough to drive any remote employee insane, a password manager is a great tool to prevent a cascading data failure if an employee’s password gets hacked from another site.

An employee’s email is often another vulnerable part of a password scheme, since it can be used to reset most passwords on most sites that your employees will use. Teaching employees how to plan and remember their one password will be much easier than teaching them how to manage multiple passwords.

Data Management

Managing your remote security is another significant concern with remote employees. How is information and data secured? How is it backed up? These important questions deal with security and business continuity with remote workers. Some businesses copy protect their data so it cannot be copied to a thumb drive or other portable media, while other businesses have their employees log into virtual machines so that the company keeps the actual data within their own datacenters.

Government Regulations

Many industries’ security concerns are regulated by governmental agencies, rules, and laws and should be considered when developing a remote employee management plan. HIPAA (healthcare), FDIC (banks and financial orgs) are just some of the security regulations and agencies your business may have to interact with when you hire remote employees.

Planning for Communication

Proper communication is perhaps the most important part of creating a remote employee management system. How will information be handled, where do employees place information regarding your business? These questions need to be an integral part of your management plan before you hire your first remote employee.

For more information on security concerns and remote employee management and to find out how we securely manage our remote team members, please contact Secure Ideas today.