Tools to Work Remotely and Secure

Many companies that already work remotely, are technology based or e-commerce startups that see distributed teams as a way to capture talent anywhere in the world. Invest in people and not so much in offices or supplies. In addition to saving costs, working remotely balance personal and work life.

When talking about how to secure your online business and cybersecurity, we often focus on servers or the website. However, the terminals from which we manage our site are just as important. Important as far as malware infection risk and attacks concern us.

Remote work comes with different challenges to traditional office work. Especially in jobs within the world of software, digital or SaaS. From an expert Java developer to a blogger coach who manages his or her WordPress, it can be done almost anywhere in the world. Living traveling. And work in the meantime.

Two basic tools to Work Remote and Secure

Imagine that you or your company carries out a good security maintenance on your website. Control infections and malware, backdoors, change passwords periodically, etc. But imagine too that you travel for work and usually use hotel wifi connections. Probably, if you are aware of the importance of having a secure website, blog or e-commerce, you would not connect without an equally secure connection. You will not want to spend hours cleaning your WordPress for an infection on your laptop.

We have already explained some tips on server security or shared hosting. But equally important is the other side. Therefore, there are two tools on the side of the terminal that make easy to work remote and secure:

A VPN connection

A VPN is a solution that allows your terminal to be in a private network, and therefore your traffic. You should always avoid managing your development environment or CMS from any public computer. This also counts for your laptop using a public Wi-Fi connection. The chances that anyone can access to your data or infect your terminal are much higher than you imagine. One solution is to use a VPN.

It is a software that encrypts your connection ensuring that your data is transferred safely. Remote workers who belong to a company usually have an already configured system in which they simply need to install the VPN client on their laptop.

Self-employed or small teams can configure a server or, if you do not want to configure the VPN environment and files, you can use services like expressvpn that provides a secure as a service VPN connection.

A remote virtual environment

This way your terminal is independent of your work environment. This solution is fully useful for distributed teams, fully in security terms:

• An easy way to manage software updates: you just have to maintain the environment you are accessing. It is therefore much easier to keep security updates up-to-date.
• Make backups easy: programs at a time that does not affect team members and backs up to that environment only.
  The solution of a virtual environment is an icon on your desktop from which you access your remote work environment. This way you execute everything that has to do with the management in another machine, server or computer. A protected and remote server or container. There are free tools like Team Viewer that have precisely that function.

Although this tool provides many advantages, it is not exempt from security risks like hackers reading your keyboard while working in that remote environment (keyloggers). As there is difficult to completely protect you from hackers, this tool help especially on teams security and improve mobility in the case of self-employed or freelance.
TRICK: a remote desktop for a good connection working on remote
Whether you work alone or as a team, if your remote environment is configured on a server from any provider, or on a site with a good width, a limited connection is no longer a problem.

If you are in a hotel with limited Wi-Fi sometimes it makes difficult to access to your environment. The impact is much less in a remote environment since you will download any file, image, or whatever you need in your remote environment. That has a bandwidth better than the one you have in a cafe or anywhere in the world. So the connection of your hotel should only be enough to connect to this environment.

To sum up, working remotely with VPN and virtual environment

If you protect the terminal side and perform a good security maintenance on your website, the risk of attack or infection drops considerably.

Also, when the team grows, security gets complicated. We start to worry about the investment in personnel, in equipment, in servers, programming hours … but it is a key point that all the workstations are secure. At the end of the day, it’s essential to prevent an infection or attack that will take us so many hours to fix.

And as a tip, one application that shows you which decent wifi spots do you have on different cities of the world, Cafewifi. But remember, connect your laptop always on a safe mode.