Important financial information, crucial customer records, and all that your business stands for is at risk if you don’t give security the due importance it demands. Your mobile devices and wireless networks are a part of your IT assets. Putting your business assets at risk is the last thing you’d want while running your business. Mobile devices and portables such as laptops are at an even greater risk since they often find a way to get out of the secure confines of offices. There are plenty of ways to ensure that this risk is mitigated. Here’s how:
The Hard Drive – Encrypt it
Laptops can be encrypted. While they can, we don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t use this option. If your laptop gets stolen, all the data contained within it is at risk. The emails, the spreadsheets, information contained within files and folders – almost everything stands exposed. If your laptop has some sort of pre-configured connection to your corporate network, it could be complete chaos. The simplest way to prevent all this from happening is to encrypt the laptops’ hard disks while putting up the need to enter a password as the first line of defense.
Virtual Private Networks exist for a reason
First, try not to use an Internet café or an airport Wi-Fi hotspot -- at least not for business use. In dire circumstances, if you do have to use such networks, make sure you are connected to your corporate IT network through a VPN (Virtual Private Network) simply because any data that has to pass through a VPN is automatically encrypted and decrypted. If you don’t have the luxury of VPN, use open source technologies such as OpenVPN, HotSpotVPN, etc. If you have no such luxury, try remote connections using GoToMyPc or LogMeIn.
Keep back ups, Secure them
Whatever data resides on your laptop should ideally be backed up either into a USB drive, external Hard disk or any of the cloud storage options that we have today. Of course, all of this back up should again be encrypted. You could use a program such as TrueCrypt for that. Some of these external hard drives also have additional security features such as brute-force attack prevention by blocking access if wrong passwords are entered.
Wireless Security
Earlier, we wrote about Wireless Security. It’s important to stay safe especially with plenty of malicious Wi-Fi networks that seem to be sprouting up everywhere. Rogue access points, as they are often called. Basically, unless you use WPA – Enterprise or WPA-2 Enterprise, you are poised to attract trouble.
Use those mobile devices. But make sure you secure them tight. Talk to us if you need to find out how to combat these security issues. We’ll be more than happy to help you.