Home Working: The secure solution
Home working: the secure solution
Proposed legislation will entitle many employees to be able to ask to work from home. However, if you do decide to grant this option, how do you maintain security?
Through the Government’s Flexible Working Regulations there are already many employees who have the right to ask to work flexibly, and there are plans to extend the right still further, to include all parents with children under-18, meaning a high proportion of workers could ask to work from home.
Working from home has many advantages – but there are some downsides. In order to communicate with the office, your staff need to have access to the office network, potentially exposing it to hacking.
There are two alternatives to connecting to your network. You can either connect indirectly via the internet or you can set up a dedicated direct connection via a modem or through a leased line into your network.
A direct connection is more secure as only one user can be attached at any one time and you need to know the phone number to dial into the network, however they’re expensive, as you need a dedicated line for every user dialling in.
Using the internet, you can connect from practically anywhere. Multiple users can access the server using just one line. However, because the internet is a shared network, anyone can potentially get access to it and intercept the information you pass to and from the network.
Happily, there are hardware and software solutions to resolve these security problems. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) effectively creates a secure, dedicated direct connection between your internal network and any external device using the internet, so gaining the best of both worlds.
VPN solutions can be hardware-based, software-based or a mixture of the two. To set up a VPN you need to encrypt the information you’re sending between your device (PC, laptop, PDA or smartphone) and your network. A hardware-based VPN device will contain specialist processors that encrypt on the fly, so your connection is fast. Software VPN devices put all the encryption work onto the devices processor which slows the device down, but with a software solution you have greater flexibility.
At the network end, the simple solution is to install a router with VPN capabilities. The router sits between your internet connection and the network and handles all the traffic, including any VPN connections. The router will then look after the encryption and verification. If you want to add extra security instead of a router, you can put in an appliance which will test the traffic to ensure viruses, spam and other nasties don’t enter your network. Alternatively, there are ADSL modems that have VPN technology built in.
At the user end, VPNs are usually software-based. Windows has a built-in VPN client but is hard to use and designed for peer-to-peer networks. Ideally, the VPN client should be the same make as the VPN at the server end.
With current PCs, a software-based VPN should be fine. Some devices don’t have the power of a desktop: for these there are portable hardware VPN. But for most users this could be encryption and security overkill.
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This article originally appeared in the July 2007 edition of Expand.