If the recent coronavirus pandemic has taught businesses anything, it’s that you need to be prepared to adapt. One of the ways that you can do this is to mobilize your work-from-home workforce. 

But as straightforward as it seems to tell your employees to go and work from home, there are many practicalities to consider. These will include managing productivity, encouraging communication and collaboration, and, most importantly of all, cybersecurity. 

As the world entered a lockdown situation, opportunistic cybercriminals saw their moment and seized it. Cybercrime shot up. This happened because home networks are not set up for the type of business use that office networks are. 

So, how do you protect your business when your employees are working from home?

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can do that. 

Hire A Managed Service Provider

The first thing that any company should do when asking their employees to work from home is to hire a managed service provider (MSP). An MSP will be able to work with you to ensure that you have all of the right security measures to protect your business as you transition to a remote workforce. 

If you’d like to learn about the specific services offered by MSPs, you can read more information on this website. 

Set Up A VPN On Your Employees Home Network

The major problem that businesses face when employees work from home is that home networks don’t have a great deal of security. They are quite easy to hack. In fact, most people don’t even change the default password. 

To get around the problems of unsecured home networks, your employees should set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) at home. 

A VPN will be a completely secure private network that your employees can use when accessing and handling your data. They are cost-effective and easy to set up. 

Use Cloud Services 

If your employees are saving their data locally on their laptops hard drive, or on any external drives, then it is at risk of getting corrupted. 

By using cloud-based services, your employee’s work will be automatically backed up and accessible to anyone with the right permissions, from wherever they are. 

This will help protect your business, but it will also help your employees collaborate more effectively. 

VoIP Telephony Systems

One of the other problems that a company will face when the employees all have to work from home is how do you receive calls? 

The answer to this question is to route the calls to your employee’s phones. The problem with using your employee’s phones is that your customers will then see the employee’s personal phone number. 

To protect your employee’s phone number, use VoIP services.

These are virtual phone lines. The customer still phones and sees your company number. They will go through the same automatic handling system as they would if they rang your call center; however, the call will be directed to the mobile of one of your remote workers. 

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