When moving to smart working in an unprepared company, you often have to deal with implementing technologies quickly and often with unsafe systems in a short time.
What solutions are suitable for my company and why are free services often a “trap” for our personal data?
Let’s start with the first scenario: a small office decides to make its employees work remotely from home using private personal computers: the IT technician will configure e-mail and access to cloud platforms and remote NAS if present by opening them on the employees’ PC the ports on their external corporate firewalls. You will think: it is just very easy! Here think this is a serious mistake. In this way, access to company data will be transmitted on an insecure platform (are we sure that the employee’s PC has no trojan, no malware or ransomware installed?) And I assure you that it will be enough to open a “fake” email with a fake “wetransfer” or an email with any “invoice” in xls or docx that our beautiful word of 2013 that we have installed on the home pc running Windows 7 (yes because not everyone has the luxury of using the office 365 subscription or last win 10 at home) that our nice system will transmit in half a second all the access keys including passwords, mail etc of the sites saved on the browser (you like not having to remember the passwords maybe write them on a notebook, right?) and then not only your system but the entire corporate security will be put at serious risk.
Let’s look at a second scenario: a company decides to implement a IPsecVPN on the firewall (virtual private network) to guarantee secure access to its employees to the internal network.
Practically a “tube” is created that allows remote access to the company infrastructure and therefore guarantees the security of data exchange.
Do you want to know what happens here? Here we have obtained in one fell swoop the saturation of the upload and download bandwidth of the company’s internet connection. Well yes unless you have very high speed network connections (above GB / s) and a limited number of users (maximum 10/15 employees) this solution immediately leads to bandwidth saturation and slow connectivity. On the contrary, assuming that the VPN is configured in a proper way and the IP addresses of the unique people are entered in the firewall whitelist or a secure RSA key authentication system is used (which is not put into operation in half a day) this solution is quite reliable.
PERSONALLY what I suggest is to have a virtual machine that runs on a parallel system (e.g. citrix or VirtualBox) or USB already configured to be able to work remotely. In that way only sniffing on network ports could lead me to have security problems.
Now let’s look at the third scenario: using remote assistance software.
There are now several very popular remote assistance software that allow you to remotely control your PC. What it means: practically it is a matter of leaving the PC on in the office and managing it comfortably from any platform we have at hand, PC, Mac, tablet, smartphone, allowing us to work remotely, access all our folders and data and send / receive mail in complete safety.
I recommend using this solution for small businesses. There are many software around for this service, personally I suggest SUPREMO a completely Made in Italy project with a complete architecture like Teamviever but with an extremely competitive cost and with secure servers located in Europe.
You can download the trial version at this link just install it on the machine to be controlled and you will have created an excellent smartworking system.
