What do the 2016 Data Predictions Mean for Your Small Business?

What do the 2016 Data Predictions Mean for Your Small Business?

Last week we touched on the growth of devices and data predicted for 2016 but what does this mean for your business? Especially if a lot of these are occurring in the home and personal life. They shouldn’t affect the office network or office security right? WRONG.

The biggest threat to your company is on the inside of your company: your employees.

If your company uses a VPN, or Virtual Private Network, which allows employees to access the corporate intranet, or to connect geographically separated offices, then the traffic from your employee’s house to the office is not looked at. So if an employee’s home network gets hacked, or they use their device at a coffee shop or hotel, those hackers have a beeline attack to the office. Most people that have a VPN aren’t ending traffic in a way that the firewall can filter through and crunch all that data.

Proper security measures also monitor what your employees are doing on a day-to day basis.  You don’t want your employees going to bittorrent sites and downloading torrents that could potentially have viruses and malware connected to them. You also don’t want your employees going to “adult” sites, if you catch my drift, or spending countless hours on social media or other time wasting sites. Application intelligence and content monitoring, security features that we provide with our security, does exactly that: monitoring what people are doing while at work. Hackers can now put exploit kits on genuine sites, so if an employee is just browsing the web, they become vulnerable to these hidden attacks.

Max Insight says that, “Nearly 15 percent of all employees who participated in the Stratecast study said they have experienced or perceived at least one malware infection, data loss, unauthorized, or blocked access incident. More than 80 percent of survey respondents admitted to using non-approved SaaS applications in their jobs.”

Everything that connects to your business network needs to be secure, otherwise you are putting your company, no matter how small at risk. That is why in 2016 we will see companies implementing stronger security solutions for employee’s at home or on the go.