Whether your employees are headed back to the office enthusiastically, with a bit of dread, or a mix of emotions, they’ll bring with them more than just their laptops, lunches, and stories from their work-from-home days upon their return. They’ll also potentially be bringing along some data security risks.
While risks around unauthorized file sharing, virus prevention, and more, might be similar to those carried while working at home, an in-office return should serve as a milestone to review key data security measures.
Get Back to the Basics: Review Organizational Cybersecurity Safety Measures
In or out of the corporate office, employees have a responsibility to help keep any sensitive data safe, no matter where it lands or travels. And organizations in turn have a duty to give those employees the training, enforced policies, and technical tools to do so in a way that does not overly stifle or slow down their work and collaboration efforts.
The overarching goal of a data security policy is to address all the protection measures surrounding the data entrusted to an organization throughout its entire lifecycle. These efforts should at the minimum address:
- Data privacy: With the increase in data privacy and protection laws, a return to office should include a reminder to employees of your data privacy policies around acceptable use of data. The processes, practices, and technology already in place to help ensure sensitive data should also be addressed. Some organizations require a signed acceptable use policy as an enforcement tool.
- Human error: Whether from the couch or at an assigned desk, the risk of making a mistake around data security is always there. However, organizations that take advantage of automation to take some of the onus off their employees for repetitive, manual tasks can lessen these risks. Automating processes such as file transfers, data classification, email security, and digital rights management can go a long way in supporting and enforcing your overall data security policies. Automation can also help employees better focus on larger picture or higher-level tasks.
Related Reading: The Benefits of File Transfer Automation
- Compliance: If your industry requires adherence to mandated compliance requirements, such as GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, etc., a review of these requirements, as well as ensuring user-friendly auditing and reporting technologies and required encryption are in place to help meet them is wise.
- Ease of use of technology tools: If a data security measure is put in place that is difficult to use, slows down collaboration, or even completely halts the sending of a file, the likelihood of it being used consistently in-house or at home is not good. Managed file transfer (MFT) tools, such as GoAnywhere MFT, utilize a user-friendly, dashboard-style interface to help make complying with organizational data security policies easier to adopt.
- Social network applications: A reminder about the risks of malicious links or other ill intents found on the many social network applications in use – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more – is always timely. Be sure your organizational data security policy clearly defines your policy around social network sites when it comes to their use on company equipment or on company time.
Don’t Forget the Cloud
While cloud-based application use ramped up during the height of the work-from-home period, as the transition back to the office or hybrid office workday marches forward, it’s important to assess what risks some of those popular, widely used applications, like Microsoft OneDrive, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more hold. Yes, collaborating via the cloud is fairly easy, but don’t let the ease fool your employees into trusting that sensitive data is totally secure. Adding a layer of security to cloud collaboration with the built-in cloud integrations or connectors in GoAnywhere can help boost your cloud security and keep users happy.
Encryption is a Key Cybersecurity Measure
Whether you need to encrypt files for compliance requirements, your trading partners require encryption to exchange data with you, or if you just know that locking down your files with robust encryption protocols is a smart, secure move, encryption is key to cybersecurity in and out of the office walls.
With encryption in place, only authorized users can view sensitive data with symmetric or asymmetric keys across any and all devices, including those brought from home back into the office.
On-Demand Webinar: How to Choose the Right Encryption Method for Securely Exchanging Files
BYOD: It’s a Cybersecurity Risk
During the pandemic, many organizations allowed their employees to use their own devices, either for convenience or by necessity. After all, employees have loved the flexibility of logging onto the corporate network using their personal devices from any place, any time. This unmanaged access, however, poses yet another cybersecurity risk.
Get the Guide: CISO Perspectives: Data Security Survey 2022
IT staff can reinforce multi-factor authentication, conduct cybersecurity training, and recommend security software for additional security, but this still can be a problem when employees are able to access sensitive organizational data with their personal devices, if those devices are compromised.
This is not some imagined risk. According to an HP study, just under 50 percent of employees regard their work laptop as a personal device and may access sites and links that have malware or other cyberthreats contained in them.
Reinforcing policies put in place for those employees who will still be working from home or who may still be working from home part of the time is critical and should include measures such as the use of approved antivirus software, two-factor authentication, and VPNs.
Consider Upgrading How Files are Transferred
If you’ve been considering a better way to manage your sensitive file transfers, a return to the office might be the perfect time to introduce managed file transfer (MFT) to your employees tasked with transferring files in and outside of the organization.
Secure file transfer (SFT) tools can help automate, streamline, and protect files both while they are in motion and while in transit. Secure file transfer plays a significant role in ensuring data is secure in and out of your organization.
Give GoAnywhere a Try for Your Return to Office
GoAnywhere MFT offers a streamlined way to securely transfer files and to protect sensitive data both while it’s in motion and while it’s at rest. A free 30-day trial can show you just how easy incorporating secure managed file transfer into your organization, no matter where employees may be working from, can be.
