Organizations across the world are rightly focusing on the well-being of their employees and asking them to work from home in the wake of the novel coronavirus outbreak. But, allowing work from home en masse comes with infrastructure- and security-related concerns, especially for companies that come under various compliance regimes.
Most organizations provide physical PCs to majority of their employees. And only a select group of employees get office laptops. Now, to enable their workforce to work remotely, several organizations are simply allowing access to Office PCs using a normal VPN and RDP. Extending existing VPN to work-from-home users with personal devices poses serious threats.
Why Organizations Should Avoid This Approach
Extending a normal or existing VPN to employees working remotely requires installation and pre-configuration on end users’ devices. Thus, IT teams need to put in a lot of effort and time to roll out Work From Home solutions for the employees.
Even if the IT teams manage to pull it off, remote users are expected to use RDP client on their machines and connect to their office PCs. Now, this would require users’ training. But the bigger problem is that the users can now use the RDP client to access their Office PCs as well as other PCs. And, whichever PC they get access to, they can actually start downloading files and do copy-paste operations.
Moreover, users’ personal devices may not have enough security checks, such as anti-virus, and may already be infected by malware. Normal VPN or free-to-use solutions do not have the features to assess potential threats in remote endpoint devices.
Thus, for organizations, especially the ones within the purview of various compliance guidelines, it becomes a major challenge to prevent data leak. That is why giving access to Office PCs over a simple VPN is a big data compliance and security risk.
To take care of these challenges, organizations should ensure that the Work From Home solution they are deploying have following features:
Minimum IT intervention: For remote users, the process to access Office PC should be easy so that they don’t need much hand-holding by the IT team.
Control on user access: The solution deployed should be able to log on a user into a particular Office PC. So, even if the user shares the credentials with others, no unauthorized user can log into the Office PC from any other device.
End-point security: The solution should have an end-point security scan functionality to decide whether a device is safe or not. It should be able to ascertain that there is no malware or the user, at least, has the basic security on his or her personal device, such as anti-virus and Windows updates, etc.
Automated connection: The work from home solution should provide an automated way to connect to Office PCs such that the users can remotely access only their office’s PC, and not other IP addresses in the network.
Simple steps to link: Users should be able to connect to Office PCs using RDP through a point-and-click process and they do not need to remember IP addresses or host names. They can connect to their Office PCs without any or with little training.
Prevent leakages: The solution should be able to restrict or prevent file download and upload functions, copy-paste and clipboard functions. It should allow policy control so that users cannot download any data into their personal machines.
Data control features: There should be provisions to prevent users from doing desktop recording or taking snapshots of their desktops while they are connected to the corporate network.
Check Internet Access: The work from home solution should also have the option to block access to Internet while the users are connected to the corporate network. This will ensure that any user with malafide intentions cannot give remote control of his device to somebody else while working on the VPN.
Organizations should evaluate all these features while deploying a VPN solution for work from home users to ensure data security and compliance.
Accops’ Work From Home Solutions Plug All Loopholes
Accops offers compliant and secure work from home solutions that enable the workforce to stay productive from their homes. Accops’ Remote Desktop-based solution enables organizations to provide secure access to office PCs from users’ personal devices.
Key features of Accops solutions are as follow:
Allow Access To Office PCs: Enable users to securely connect to their Office PCs using personal devices. Employees get instant access in a Zero Trust environment to enterprise data and business applications
Device Entry Control: Allow only approved devices to access corporate resources. Mitigate issues with BYOD devices for remote access
Data Control Features: Block data exchange between user PC and Office PC, data download, copy-paste, print-screen and screen recording. Also, it can completely block or selectively enable Internet
Enable Strong MFA: Quickly enables strong authentication for secure VPN access.
Accops can enable organizations to quickly set up work from home solutions and keep their businesses running.