In this current environment so many businesses have been forced to send their staff home and find solutions for working remotely. Laptop sales have soared, and many offices have had their workers bring home their office workstations to set up for working from home. Others have scrambled to have enough devices that can be mobile, leading to some workers using their home computer to work from home.
How can you set up your office staff from home so that their connection to the office is secure and reliable? How can you ensure that the device used at home is capable and secure?
There are a couple of straight forward options that businesses can take to feel comfortable that their staff are set up for success from home and over a secure connection.
- Set up a Virtual Private Network (VPN) from your office environment to enable your staff to access their work files over the internet connection securely. In this case, the computer used from home acts like it is on the same local network as the VPN, allowing it to securely access local network resources from outside the office.
- Set up a Remote Desktop Service (RDS) to enable your staff to open a remote session on your server and make updates and changes to files on the server. The original files are modified, backed up and secure. Make sure that the RDS is set up with a secure encryption to protect the data on the server.
- Set up a combination of these two services to have a very secure, but remote session working on files on your server. A VPN first, then log in to an RDS.
- Use a virtual desktop interface solution, such as Citrix, to launch a standard operating environment (SOE) on your staff’s computers, whether at the office or working from home, to enable consistent, secure and reliable connections to your servers. In this case, the applications and data are all located in your server environment, whether on-premise or in the cloud.
- Work purely in the cloud, using a VPN to access your files that are remotely hosted all the time, rather than on your own onsite infrastructure. There are a range of cloud-based applications that are applicable for some businesses, others may wish to sign up to a cloud environment to host a similar infrastructure as they have had onsite.
- And above all, ensure that your staff have up to date operating systems, applications and anti-virus software on the devices they are using from home.
If you need help to implement any of these strategies, contact us, we’d love to help.
#workingfromhome #virtualdesktopinterface #VDI #workinthecloud #hostedworkspaces #DaaS
