In the age of remote work, virtual workspaces are under greater threat now than they’ve ever been. Although opportunities to work from home have expanded over the course of years, the sudden shift of many companies and industries to a more digital workspace has left many of those companies scrambling to adjust. As a result, many of the security needs of these workspaces go overlooked, leaving company, employee, and customer data vulnerable to unwanted access by hackers and other bad actors.
The KPI Network aims to combat this threat by providing secure solutions to companies operating on a more remote basis. We work with some of the biggest companies in the world providing business network solutions, including ADP and Comcast Business, to ensure that businesses stand prepared to face all the threats that come with a greater shift to workspace virtualization.
Read on to find out more about some of the common cybersecurity threats these workspaces face, methods to keep those workspaces secure, and how we can help keep your data protected.
A few standard threats tend to appear with varying degrees of severity to threaten your employee, company, and customer data. These typically include phishing, malware, man-in-the-middle attacks, and DDoS attacks. These threats work in different ways to gain access to your data and can’t all necessarily be dealt with in a uniform way, and some pose more of a threat to a virtual workspace environment than others.
Phishing, for example, is an old method used to gain access to an account and its data. It involves clicking a link or opening an attachment in your email which installs software onto your system and gives the hacker access to your account. They can use this to view sensitive data on the system or engage in fraudulent activity in an employee or customer’s name.
Ransomware attacks work somewhat similarly, taking control over a system or account and demanding some form of payment to return access to the user. This isn’t just a threat to your workspace when it attacks a company system or account. If an employee is targeted in exchange for sensitive company data, they may be able to provide the hacker with the information they’re demanding. Read more about this topic in this Security Intelligence article.
A variety of cybersecurity solutions exist to make workspace virtualization a safer, more secure transition for many companies, but they aren’t necessarily enough on their own. The workspace’s digital infrastructure needs to be designed with security in mind from the beginning, coupled with considerations for the human factor of cybersecurity threats, as mentioned in the previous section regarding ransomware threats.
We’ve written in our blog before about some best practices for virtual workspace security that you can train your employees to keep in mind when accessing company systems and data. To summarize, these include backing up important data, providing ongoing training to spot suspicious activity that may indicate a cyber threat, using a firewall to protect your company’s network, improving password protection, and keeping company software up to date.
There are a few additional considerations to keep in mind, though. You should institute policies for your company regulating device use and remote work security protocols, keeping your company’s cyber threat intelligence up to date and communicating known threats to employees, and making sure your company IT team is available to handle threats as they appear. You can read more about this topic from SHRM here.
Your company data is important to both your employees and your customers, and through the process of workspace virtualization, you need to be sure that data is as secure as possible. Subscribe to our newsletter for more tips on virtual workspace security and other business service solutions or view our preview offers now.