A quick guide to securing your remote workforce through 2021

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Even with promising vaccine news making headlines, it's likely that many businesses will be working remotely for some (or all) of 2021. And if there's one thing 2020 has taught us all, it's that there is no such thing as over preparing. While employees adjust to long-term working from home and the security of the office walls are still out of reach, cyber attacks are on the rise and becoming increasingly sophisticated.

Lineup has adopted a multi-layered security approach (see below), and in the process learned the importance of keeping its entire staff (not just IT) up to date on security best practice. In partnership with Senseon, Lineup compiled a guide that can be downloaded here. It includes an overview of new and ongoing security threats, as well as security tips for your employees.

From Chief Information Officer Rob Hesmondhalgh about what Lineup has done to secure the company and its customers:

Like so many others, in mid-March Lineup’s staff began working remotely. Work carried on at its usual rapid pace across all of our teams, now spread out in 13 different countries. By all accounts, we have been very privileged to remain busy, productive, and yes, secure. This is not by accident — we’ve taken concrete steps to ensure we can protect ourselves and our customers during this time and beyond.

Outside the secure, controlled environment of a traditional office lurk many security threats, and no IT team can protect against them all without help. That is why we have not only implemented security systems and procedures, but we’ve also made a concerted effort to educate the wider Lineup team on these measures, so that each and every employee is as secure as possible.

In the last several months, we have:

  • Become an ISO/IEC 27001 accredited organization.
  • Delivered base level of security awareness training (completed by 98% of staff within the first two weeks).
  • Run regular phishing tests and delivered targeted training, effectively reducing our phishing risk to 1.6% (industry standard is 12.2% or lower).
  • Tightened our password strength policies, expiring system passwords and implementing multi-factor authentication.
  • Completed a device audit on every company-owned device and encrypted all hard drives.
  • Implemented a technical solution (Senseon) to detect and respond to dangerous network activity.
  • Meticulously secured and backed up Adpoint to reduce our customers’ risk.

Of course, this list is not comprehensive, and there will always be new threats to address. But these decisive actions have no doubt secured our team and reassured our customers worldwide.

To that end, theis guide shares actionable advice from our chosen cyber-defense platform, Senseon. We’ve followed this advice and educated our staff on potential threats. Whether you’re planning to continue remote working long-term, adopt a hybrid model or eventually return to the office, this is an excellent place to start. Share this information with your team, even your customers. I’m confident you’ll find it useful.

Download the report

Lineup, remote work