Friday Donut tip: secure remote working

Friday Donut tip: secure remote working

Every Friday we bring you a great business IT tip. From nuggets that make repetitive tasks easier to easy ways to banish tech annoyances, we’re here to help.

If there’s something you’d like our help with, send an email to [email protected] or just leave a comment on this post. We’ll try and cover it in a future IT Donut tip.

Safer remote working

As remote working becomes more common, businesses are having to cope with some new security risks. There’s the possibility of laptop theft, of course, and using insecure wireless connections means anyone could be eavesdropping on your data.

And what if your laptop gets rained on, or you leave it in a taxi by accident? You won’t just lose your laptop, but you’ll lose all the data on it too – and that could be a big blow to your business.

To avoid this happening, whenever possible, don’t save important documents and data to your laptop. If your business has a network server, you should have space on there to save everything. If you don’t have a network drive available on your computer, ask your IT supplier to set one up and put a shortcut on your desktop so you can find it easily.

Of course, it’s not always possible to save to a network server. If you’re not in the office, you need to be connected remotely to your company network so you can access your resources. If you’re working without a connection, save files to your laptop and make sure you copy them to the server once you’re back online.

Use the power of the cloud

If your company doesn’t have its own network server, you can achieve a similar effect using cloud storage. Services like Dropbox and Box let you create a special folder on your computer. Anything you save in there automatically gets copied to a server on the internet too. So if you lose your laptop, you don’t lose your data.

Finally, here’s one last tip for laptop workers: if you’re stepping away from your computer, make sure you lock it. In Microsoft Windows, just hold the Windows key and tap L. That’ll make sure nobody can meddle with it while you’re not there.

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