Telecommuting Needs Security Precautions

Telecommuting has become a way of life for most enterprises. It's good for morale, productivity and costs. Employees are often encouraged to work at home, on the road, in planes, in hotels and anywhere else they can connect to the internet.

The perils are well documented and quite well known - loss of mobile devices through theft or carelessness. hacking of the devices at low security locations, like coffee shops or hotels.

Enterprises have been trying to deal with these threats. Many have required encryption of the devices, or at least encrypted data. Some have set up Virtual Private Networks to strengthen access to their networks. These and other precautions are worth considering for most enterprises.

One of the issues with telecommuting these days is the use by employees of their own devices such as laptops, notebooks, tablets and smart phones. All of these have security issues and all need to be addressed by the enterprise. One precaution that needs to be taken is to take steps to ensure that only authorized devices can access the networks. This can be done by device fingerprinting, using such key data as the device serial number and IP address to identify the devices that have been authorized to gain access and thus screen out hackers. Given the considerable extent of telecommuting that takes place now, these and other steps are often critical to an enterprises in devising its security policy. For more on this, check out this article.