Do your employees enjoy the benefits of working from home? If so, you also understand all the concerns that come with their offsite connectivity. Such remote access to your company’s services is a potential security breach. Hackers can take control of these accounts and disrupt all phases of your business. Here are three ways to eliminate account access vulnerability among remote employees.

Add Antivirus Software

Photo Flickr/Mike Cogh

Research suggests 60 percent of companies have suffered data breaches over the last two years. You should provide your employees with computer hardware such as laptops rather than allow them to use their own. This will allow you to have the ability to add software to each system. This strategy attacks the same problem twice to guarantee full protection.

You cannot control the internet surfing behavior of your workers. Some sites include malware that will infect a computer. Then, when the user connects to your servers, the malware will attempt to replicate itself there.

By providing your own hardware, you can guarantee that antivirus protection runs in tandem with the system. Similarly, you can set the software to update automatically. Antivirus programs lose effectiveness if they’re not current with new malware. You shouldn’t trust your employees to update the software. Instead, you can do it yourself before handing the laptops over to your workers. That guarantees they use up-to-date protection.

Add Cloud Software

Even if your company does provide computer hardware with current antivirus software, you still aren’t safe. Hackers are always trying to find new ways to compromise systems. It’s a criminal industry that costs consumers between $375 billion and $575 billion annually. So, you must include many safeguards to protect your business interests.

The best way to shield your servers is through constant vigilance via real-time security protection. One of the most clever cloud-based software solutions is Skyhigh Threat Protection, a third-party account verification service. It’s a perfected automated system that recognizes when your employees are accessing your servers inappropriately. In other words, it can tell if your employee is attempting to read and write to files they don’t need.

Cloud-based threat protection software can also identify if multiple accounts in different locations are using the same log-in, a strong sign of incursion. This type of heuristic programming is functionally a full-time monitor for all your servers. Purchasing this product will save you money in the long run.

Train Employees on Proper Procedures

With the technology side of your servers covered, the last step is to teach employees about the dangers of social engineering. Hackers understand that the easiest way to gain access to your servers is by tricking your employees. They’ll try to con workers with various tactics such as pretending that they’re from the company’s IT department. Then, they’ll ask users to provide their login data and passwords.

Obviously, no one should fall for this tactic, yet some do. You need to train your employees about what your IT department will and won’t do when they contact remote workers. That way, they’ll know never to give their passwords to strangers.

Allowing your employees to work from home is a great way to build loyalty. Still, you have to safeguard your servers against the potential incursions created by remote access. Follow the steps above to protect your business from disaster.