Remote Workers and Small Businesses: How to Protect Company’s Data

Nowadays, more businesses than ever have remote workers. NordVPN gives advice on how to protect company’s data when working from different locations

December 16, 2015. Holidays are around the corner, and more workers than ever will be working remotely while enjoying their Christmas vacation. It’s becoming a common practice, especially for small businesses, to set up remote offices, or at least to hire freelancers who are not bound by one location.

Small businesses are not always aware that when an employee connects to company’s network from another location, especially a place with public wi-fi, the whole network gets exposed and can be easily hacked into. This applies to Starbucks, restaurants, hotels, airport and other public wi-fi locations. Open wi-fi networks do not use any kind of encryption for the data one receives and sends on the Internet, and most websites on open networks do not use a secure protocol or an ‘https’ URL.
The fact that public locations use open wi-fi connections makes them wide open to attacks like identity thefts and data snooping. One does not even have to be really knowledgeable in hacking as there is software - like Wireshark - that makes it absolutely easy to spy on someone’s Internet activity on an unsecured network.
However, there is a solution: a simple encryption method that can be used by anyone, called a VPN. VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, connect you to the Internet through an encrypted tunnel. VPN server acts as a relay between the Internet and a company’s private network, so nobody can see what data is being shared over the Internet. All that can be seen is that you are connected to a VPN server.
A VPN service provider, such as NordVPN.com, can offer multiple benefits to small businesses, including secure data connections between remote workers and the power to create remote working environment without being scared of data breaches.
The setup of NordVPN for small businesses is also easy. One account can be used by up to six different devices.
Here are the main steps depending on the current office network setup:
1. If your office’s internal network can only be reached with allowed IP addresses that are set up by office administrator. Allowed IPs: when an administrator adds allowed IPs for individual users to make sure the data is not accessed by an insecure network. In this case, the office simply purchases a dedicated IP address from NordVPN together with VPN services, whitelists it with their network and the internal network’s communication becomes encypted! They can use OpenVPN protocol to reach any data in their network.
2. If your office doesn’t allow adding other IP addresses and you connect through internal office VPN. Then you don’t need a dedicated IP address. Simply purchase NordVPN account and connect through OpenVPN, PPTP or L2TP protocols. The protocol determination depends on the protocol that your internal VPN uses – it has to be different from NordVPN protocol you will use. If you don’t know which protocol is used by your internal VPN, ask your network administrator – they are said to know it all.
For more information about staying safe online, visit NordVPN.com.


ABOUT NORDVPN
NordVPN is the world’s most advanced VPN service provider that is more security oriented than most VPN services. It offers double VPN encryption, anti DDoS & Tor Over VPN services. It has just launched a new NordVPN Mac App that provides a unique algorithm, allowing to automatically connect to the fastest server. The product is very user friendly, offers one of the best prices on the market, has over 100 servers worldwide and is P2P friendly. One of the key features of NordVPN is zero log policy.