How Business Can Ensure Online Safety While Working From Home
Tags: workfromhome, onlineprivacy, proxyserver, remotework
Published: 2020-03-20 15:34:33

*2020 brought some inevitable changes in our lives with COVID-19, commonly known as Coronavirus, spreading like wildfire through all the world. With this virus came a lot of changes not only in our personal lives but also with our work-life since more and more people are working from home. But with that also came a lot of difficulties* - **how can companies secure that their confidential data won’t be leaked while their employees are connecting to the company’s databases so they could manage to complete their daily work tasks**? *Especially when nowadays we hear a lot of information about the data breach and that brings a lot of troubles for business. This article will try to answer the following question and offer you some solutions.*

**Remote work - for and against**

Working from home is/was daily life of freelancers all over the world. You can manage your own time and be flexible, you have your own custom environment, there are no office distractions, you can save more money, etc. Nevertheless, this style of working is not always an option, especially when it comes to big businesses that want their employees to be found at the office during work hours which is logical when you keep in mind the fact that for business to operate properly a lot of meetings are happening as well as some extreme situations can occur and people are needed right here and right now. Also, it is believed that working from home *reduces employees' productivity*, but then again, not everyone who works in the office performs every day at 100% capacity. That’s why nowadays many companies around the globe offer their employees the possibility to work remotely from time to time and this practice actually improves employees’ performance in the long run. Of course, you can find many advantages and disadvantages for both work styles, but in a **situation like we have today, working from home became the only option for most businesses to still work** and for most employees to save their jobs.

**Work from home: safety first!**

With the expectation that sustained efforts will be needed to deal with the pandemic, companies are preparing for months without their staff in offices, with meetings being canceled or shifted to video conferencing. The thing is that even if most people appreciate this precaution and are ready to work from home, companies and workers must take necessary precautions to ensure online security so no sensitive data would be leaked. Companies should not only ensure that every employee will have the necessary work tools but also create safe ways to access necessary data. On the other end - employees must understand and act accordingly to ensure that they will follow all the regulations.


*So what security measures should be taken?*
Companies must inform workers of security expectations. Your employee may have a more laissez-faire attitude than you do regarding online security. Make sure they are educated on what you expect of them. Then, provide them with everything they need (including all the information) so they could work safely.
                
 **Secure your devices and data remotely**
There are many software tools that help organizations to ensure device and data security from the cloud. You can set password requirements for devices, blacklist possibly harmful applications, and separate work and private data. And in case a device gets lost, you can lock and wipe it remotely.
          
 **VPN services - using a VPN is integral to online security.**
When working through a VPN, you are granted a provisional IP address and nobody can know your actual location. This is important when you have to bypass some geo-restrictions and access content that’s not available in your current location. Besides, wIth a VPN you can access files from your home desktop without the fear of being watched. In general, VPNs give you a lot of security and privacy and if a business implements it correctly in its day-to-day use it really improves security for both, business and its employees. At this moment, many companies around the world are starting to use VPNs so they could protect their data and offer high security for their employees.
 
**Personal info, files, and data protection.**
-Perform all transactions on a secure, password-protected network.
-Use different passwords for every account.
-Use chat apps with strong encryption.
-Encrypt your data. Doing this means that even if hackers were to somehow get access to some of your data, they wouldn’t be able to read it without the encryption key.

**Proxies.** 
Proxies are another alternative for VPN that is most commonly used by businesses in such cases as web scraping, SEO, ad verification, testing affiliate links, etc. Proxies are also used for secure connections and to hide your own IP address from snooping eyes. Proxies help businesses to create safe connections and this is all that matters in the time like this when businesses have to take all the necessary measures to ensure that none of the safety protocols will be violated. At the moment, you can find many high-quality proxy providers that can offer business safe services to use and some of these providers can be found in [this detailed proxy market research](https://medium.com/@Proxyway/proxy-market-research-top-5-proxies-for-web-scraping-in-2020-297ddf0d254b). Apart from that, I would also recommend checking these proxy providers that can be useful to businesses:
**-[Smartproxy](https://smartproxy.com/)**. This is a provider that can offer you [datacenter](https://smartproxy.com/proxies/shared-proxies) proxies as well as [residential](https://smartproxy.com/proxies/residential-proxies) proxies with the pool of 10 million IPs from various locations in the world. Their proxies are pretty fast and work with all major browsers and operating systems and they are offering 24/7 quality support. Also, **at the time like this when proxy services are highly needed for the business to perform at full capacity and to stay safe, Smartproxy offer its customers 20% discount for the first purchase of any plan with the code [SMARTPRO](https://prf.hn/click/camref:1101ldzVd/pubref:ensure-online-safety)** so I would highly recommend to try these services and to stay secure;
**- [GeoSurf](https://www.geosurf.com/)**. It takes less than 5 minutes to integrate and a couple of clicks to use. Their proxy supports the IP:port method with IP whitelist, the username-password solution, and session persistence with an API. This provider offers not only proxy services but also desktop or mobile VPN which is great since VPNs play a great role in secure online connections and data encryption as I already mentioned above. GeoSurf can offer its clients more than 2.5 million IPs from various locations and in more than 1700 cities around the world so it has a pretty decent pool that can be used to meet business needs.
**-[Oxylabs](https://oxylabs.io/)**. The provider has more than 2 million datacenter proxy pool + more than 30 million residential proxies that are 100% anonymous proxies from all around the globe with zero IP blocking.  With such capacity, Oxylabs can provide truly high-quality services to its customers. Apart from proxy services, Oxylabs also offers a *Real-Time crawler* that can be a great help for businesses that work a lot with web scraping and data gathering tasks. 
You can find more information about various proxy service providers on [this review site](https://proxyway.com/).

**Communication.**
Communication is still the key to a successful business and its performance. In a situation like this, when most of the people are working from home, companies must find secure ways to keep the communication alive between all the departments - would it be just day-to-day updates about work progress or online meetings. Every business should make sure the video conferencing software uses encryption. 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protection is necessary, at the very least. Also, there are many safe communication platforms that can be used such as **Slack, Teams, Skype, Zoom, and Trello** available for their employees. Currently, **Microsoft and Google** are giving away their enterprise-level conferencing tools, Teams and G Suite Hangouts Meet, respectively, for free for a limited time.


At the moment we don’t know how long the pandemic of coronavirus will last and that means that we will see some dramatic changes in a way that people work. When once working from home wasn’t a possibility for many, now it becomes a necessity and many businesses in the world will have to adjust to that. For this practice to be successful we all will have to learn one thing - **online security is a priority**, so both, business and its employees will have to adapt to it and repeat this mantra before the beginning of every workday. But in the age of technologies and innovations, it’s not so difficult to find ways for this to happen, we just have to be smart about what precautions we are taking and that we all understand why it is necessary.