AVOID HOME WORKING DATA DISASTERS

Effectively managing your data whilst home working can present real challenges, especially when sharing devices with other household members.

Added to this is the increasing variety of cloud data repositories, such as Dropbox, OneDrive and iCloud, that we all now use – our own research shows a sharp increase in the combined use of such cloud services over the last 12 months, and may mean our data is outside of our control.

In the latest of our IT advice specials we give some guidance on improving data management.

Keep It Personal

Consider different user profiles on your computer for work and personal as this significantly improves your security. The same applies if you’re sharing a device with family members – make sure they have their own profiles as it’s a good way of safely segmenting access to data.

Avoid mixing file locations between family Cloud storage platforms like Dropbox or Google Drive with work systems, such as SharePoint. Use a different password for each system utilised and consider using a secure password storage platform, such as LastPass or Bitwarden. Also, enable two-factor authentication for your personal accounts.

Keep Up-To-Date

Don’t ignore operating system requests to update and re-start as these often contain security patches. Yes, it’s frustrating when Windows 10 asks you to restart your machine but make sure you do, as it ensures your system is far less prone to a hacking attempt.

If you’re storing business information on your own computer/laptop whilst working from home it’s always best to use your company data cloud if you can. If this isn’t possible, make sure you always back-up to an external drive. Apple computers are supplied with Time Machine and there is similar software available for PCs that allows secure data back-up to an external drive.

And finally, always make sure you keep your anti-virus software up-to-date and running in the background.

Here To Help

Unsure of how to manage your work data safely and efficiently? Call or email us and we’ll help. Lifeline IT’s specialist home working webinars have been useful for many of our clients – get in touch if you’d like us to organise one for your team.

Reference:

1. Lifeline IT Annual IT Trends Research. March 2020