Ensuring Online Safety At Work - Both In & Out of The Office

Staying safe when online is imperative in our day and age where hackers and online scammers are increasingly more and more prevalent. It is important to ensure online safety wherever we are, but when we at work or in the office, there are a number of things that we could be doing to ensure that our business remains safe too that may be slightly different to the methods that we employ to keep our households secure electronically.

In this guide to ensuring online safety at work, we look at numerous methods that employees should use to help maintain their company’s online security as well as ideas for employers that can help in their quest to keep their business online but totally private to cyber-criminals.

Tips To Ensure Online Safety At Work

Put up posters with tips at water coolers and photocopiers

This is a great idea for employers to carry out as it is the type of information that people will assimilate without knowing. This means that they will act more safely online without even realizing that they are doing it. Work with your cyber security team to come up with easy to remember tips that are also easy to implement.

Consistently offer educational seminars on how to stay safe online

One of the key ways that employers and business owners can ensure that their employees remain safe whilst online, and therefore their business as a whole remains safe from hackers, is to offer training and educational seminars regarding the very ways we should all be trying to stay safe online. It may take a few goes to get everyone involved in the office, but knowing what risks are out there is one of the fundamental methods of making employees use the internet and online systems with care. Plus, in the ever changing world of cyber crime where threats come from different places and in different ways every day, it is important for employees to attend such training regularly so they are kept abreast of any updates.

Create a community that values privacy

Through education as well as the general ethos of the company, it is a good idea to try to create a community that respects privacy and instills good working practice when it comes to upholding the sanctity of a business online. This way, it means that employees won’t feel like they are being labored with yet another corporate policy that they have to adhere to whilst also completing their daily tasks and doing their day to day job.

Clear desk policy

A clear desk policy may not sound like something that will help maintain security online, but it starts to encourage good working practices within employees. For starters, it will mean that they do not leave their work phones or tablets or laptops out. Instead, they will either lock them away in their personal filing drawers along with other confidential documentation or simply take items like cell phones with them – wherever they are going, be it out to a client lunch for a couple of hours or simply when going on a comfort break.

Wifi when traveling

One of the biggest security risks to a firm is when their employees leave the office, and the safety of the company’s internet connection, and go away traveling. This means they are likely to use public networks when travelling which are not secure. It also means that devices with company sensitive data is leaving the safety of the company building which also opens itself up to theft and therefore having information enter the wrong hands. Employees need to be taught how to search the web safely and use internet connections securely if they are connected over a server that is public.

Be wary of social media

Employees leaking sensitive company data online is far more common than we think and it is often not done with any malicious intent. Instead, it is done simply through the use of social media – perhaps by tagging a location that could give some form of clue to a market sensitive deal that is going ahead, or by posting a photo that has computer screens open in the background with yet more sensitive information included. Teaching employees to think twice before posting is a surefire way to up a company’s online security.

Get a firm wide VPN

Lastly, one of the best ways, if not the best way to ensure online safety at work is to use a VPN that will encrypt all data that is transmitted online over software systems and the internet. This encryption means that company data is difficult to hack and get hold of by online cyber criminals thus making your firm that much more impregnable and hard to attack electronically.

Ensuring Online Safety At Work: The Bottom Line

Given that so much of a company or business’s work is conducted online nowadays, it is imperative that a firm not only has stringent cyber security policies in place, but it also has a cyber security strategy along with clear procedures for employees to follow.