How To Manage Your Remote IT Needs, While Keeping Security A Priority

You role as an IT decision-maker can get tricky when working with remote employees, and multiple offices.

Remote employees pose many different threats and problems that could impact your IT efforts.

Managing these workers, while ensuring they are working from a secure network, is never easy. In light of all this, we’ve developed a set of must-haves to help guide you as you secure your network, while managing the IT for remote office locations.

Must-haves for setting up a secure network.

For example, if your company has employees who office at home, you’ll need to make sure they are using a network that’s secure. Setting up this secure network can prove to be a challenge to your security.

To do this, you’ll need to do some things first.

Network audit. First, you need to complete a network audit. This remote access audit you will want to look for things like which devices are accessing your network, when they are on the network, and complete some penetration testing.

Assess VPN needs. Second, you’ll need to assess your VPN needs. Users at your multiple sites could have slightly different VPN needs. In our experience, we’ve found the best approach to choosing the best VPN service is to take careful inventory of your needs, then go shopping.

In your research, you’ll find you don’t need to shop for long, as the solution may be as simple as a router-based solution or something similar.

Some additional questions to ask:

• How secure does the access to your offices need to be?
• Which employees need secure access in their home networks?
• Should you secure casual browsing, or all web browsing?
• Is your hardware, like your router’s, running on outdated or compromised firmware?
• What’s your process to update all firmware for your network hardware?
• Do you need anonymity on your network? (many VPN providers promise anonymity, but few actually provide it)
• What protocols does your VPN support?
• How many servers do they have and where?
• How many connections are allowed?
• Does my VPN provider limit bandwidth, throttle connections, or restrict services?

How to secure once your audit is done.

Once your audit is complete, you need to establish some configuration options when dealing with remote access to your corporate intranet and servers.  This is where your policies will come in handy, which should be a part of your overall IT strategy.

Consider giving access to your intranet with a remote access VPN. Research and test different options.

Check out some additional options here.

An IT decision makers best friend.

Your head is most likely spinning at the thought of all the work that you need to do.

Selecting a solid VPN solution can appear like a dreaded task. Which is why you shouldn’t do it alone.

At DigiSync Technology Solutions, we’re more than willing to help you by cutting through the red tape and help you get to the end goal of selecting a VPN for your multi-sites that makes good business sense.

For more help with this and other IT topics, email us here to learn more about how we can help you with your outsourced IT issues.