Can employees work safely in an internet café?

Hybrid working, from home or anywhere with an internet connection, creates new challenges.

“Working securely used to be so much simpler!” Could be uttered by any IT manager around the world. Back in the good old days there was one place where everyone worked: the office. You used business applications within those four walls and confidential customer or company data remained safely hidden behind one or more firewalls.

The modern world of work is giving IT managers new headaches.

Endpoint security

With the rise of cloud computing, a secure network connection has become absolutely essential. But what happens ‘outside’ of that network is not something you can always protect yourself. Having confidence in the firewall of a data center is still possible, but other external network locations, such as open Wi-Fi in an internet café, should by definition never be trusted. Downloading something from a SaaS application to a client is not necessarily safe.

If you use an insecure connection you run the risk that people external actors are watching and taking notes. Safe hybrid working starts with securing endpoints, such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. The traditional ‘firewall focus’ on the company network is not enough to guarantee security.

Conditional Access

On top of securing your endpoints, you need to apply conditional access to enable users to make decisions that enforce organisational policies. Conditional access looks for a specific set of signals from a user to make decisions about where or not to grant access to the corporate environment. This means that a user only gets access if certain criteria are met. Criteria like user name, IP address, device, location etc.

How Ekco helps with secure working

Security is a massive of people’s day-to-day work and is an almost constant topic on the agenda of our people. Together with your organisation, we draw up a modern security policy, which is a living document we then constantly keep up-to-date as your company grows or changes.

Our security specialists update you on your security posture on a regular basis, by means of security workshops. In addition, we also offer Managed Firewalls as a service, so that you don’t have to worry about whether an application, printer, NAS or any other device works in a secure environment.