Bringing Your Work Home
Many home offices are an extension of the main corporate office. The issue is the physical and cyber security controls at the office are much more robust than the controls most people have at home. Many people enjoy working at home, but do not realize the security risk they pose to the mothership.Questions to Think About When Working from Home
Do you transport secret company information from work to home? Are those secrets on a laptop, briefcase, or file folders?The locks on your home office, do they meet company standards? Does your company have standards for locks for home offices?
The Problem
The issue is that people bring “stuff” home to work on in their home office, and end up working on the kitchen table with company secrets on display for everyone visiting to see. People at home throw out company data in the household trash and leave the data (digital and physical) in the wide open while they are gone. What prevents a visitor (or thieves) taking a look at company secrets while it sits on your desk or computer.Security Precautions to Take For You Home Office
1. Locks. Your home office needs to be physically secure from the rest of the house, as much as possible in a residential construction. The lock on the door should be better than an ordinary household lock. Greater the sensitivity of the data you work on at home, greater the security requirements.2. Physical Data Containers. Any physical items (like papers) that contain company sensitive information should be in a locked container that cannot be removed from the office. All papers (and other physical items) need to be locked in the vault when leaving the home office. It is important not only to secure the company assets when leaving the house, but every time you leave your home office. As you never know when you are going to need to leave the house quickly this ensure the data is secure.
3. Secure Work PC. The computer you use for work at home should either be a company provisioned/secured computer or a computer that is secured to company standards. This computer at home should not be used by any other family members. As the physical security at home is less than the office this computer should have full disc encryption. TrueCrypt or Vista Bitlocker are two options to fully encrypt the computer.
4. Minimize Home Office Traffic. If your home office is going to contain company information then reducing the number of people that flow though your home office is a good idea. Same rule applies at any office, thus the reason for meeting rooms.
5. Transportation of data files. Files and computers when moved from work to the home office must be done in a secure method. Computer data needs to be encrypted, including the hard drives in the laptops. Any papers should be in a locked container and kept in the trunk. Nowadays, getting data from the office to work should almost always be in digital form. Transporting paper is risky unless you are hiring an armoured transport truck for your papers.
6. VPN. The safest method to get data from work to home is VPN. That way you do not need to transport anything physically from work to home.
7. Trash. Don’t throw any company secrets into the trash. This data needs to be disposed with the same security in mind as at the office. Get a cross shredder, and shred everything. They make great shredders now that destroy CDs/DVDs effectively as well.
8. Wireless. If you are using wireless networking at home make sure your wireless network is encrypted.
9. Computer Security Basics. Even though the computer you use for work needs to be secured to company standards, there are three things you can do that a long way in keeping the computer safe:
- Turn on the desktop firewall
- Have anti-virus software installed with automatic virus signature updates
- Keep the computer’s operating system and applications fully patched
