Remote Worker Management: Enable DNS Security With Roaming Clients

Remote worker management is likely new to you. And it’s not just the difficulty of having your team suddenly miles apart that you need to contend with. You also suddenly need to employ tools that are more conducive to work-from-home environments.

Though the transition to a work-from-home workspace wasn’t easy, you might be seeing a boost in employee productivity. One study done by Stanford in 2014 found that when employees work from home, there is up to a 14% increase in productivity. As businesses settle into remote offices and see the benefits, we’re expecting to see a lot of companies move to a completely digital work environment.

But one thing you need to address in a new way is how you manage your employees’ internet access. After all, they are now at home, connected to their personal networks, and likely able to access any websites they choose to during working hours. And if you transition to a work-from-home setup permanently, you need to prepare your businesses with long-lasting solutions, not temporary ones.

Here, we’ll dive into how DNSFilter Roaming Clients can assist you with remote worker management.

First: What are Roaming Clients?

Roaming Clients are DNS clients deployed on devices that users take home. The point of Roaming Clients is primarily to extend DNS protection to devices that go off the company’s network. This way, the policies that are enforced in your office are still enforced when that user accesses their device on their home network.

Now let’s cite how Roaming Clients can assist you with remote worker management.

Block inappropriate and unproductive sites

At your office, you might have DNS protection enabled, meaning you’re blocking certain sites that you deem inappropriate in the workplace. But if you only deployed those protections on the network only, employees can access those blocked sites as soon as they leave the network.

As of 2016, 90% of adults in the US spent up to 18 hours every month browsing Facebook. With Roaming Clients, you can enable policies that are scheduled during working hours. This prevents employees from wasting time on social media sites during peak work hours, but allows them to check in later in the day.

Working from home allows us to be more flexible in how we work, but it can also be distracting to work by ourselves for so much of the day. Sometimes we idly go to websites that we’re used to accessing in our spare time. Placing preventative measures like this doesn’t mean you don’t trust your employees to stay on-task, it’s more about helping them stay focused and not give into idling away their time.

Security threat protection

Allowing employees to take devices home is a major concern of IT teams, because it can open employees up to a range of security vulnerabilities. When you can’t apply network protection, you need to find a way to prevent employees from accessing malicious sites. You can do this by implementing Roaming Clients.

Just like on-network DNS protection, Roaming Clients prevent the resolution of malicious DNS requests. This includes:

• Phishing sites
• Ransomware
• Malware
• Cryptojacking
• Botnets

Extend DNS protection to work-issued mobile devices

A lot of employers don’t just issue laptops to their employees, but also Android and iOS devices. Mobile devices are just as susceptible to malicious attacks as laptop or desktop computers.

57% of organizations have reported experiencing a mobile phishing attack. During the coronavirus pandemic, phishing attacks increased an estimated 350%.

Hackers are very good at deception. If you glance at an email quickly on your phone, you can mistake it for a real email very easily. You might not look closely at the sender address to determine if it’s legitimate.

Roaming Clients prevent access to scams like this to better mitigate risk at your company. This way, you’re not holding your employees accountable for reacting quickly to an email that looks like it’s coming from you when it’s actually a phishing scam.

Better employee visibility

It’s hard to know what websites your employees as a whole are accessing when they’re all on different networks. DNSFilter Roaming Clients provide endpoint visibility, meaning that you can see top sites accessed by device.

This can help you find trends in your employees’ habits, eliminate shadow IT for better remote worker management, and provide insight into non-work related sites that may need to be blocked during work hours.

Ready to deploy Roaming Clients using DNSFilter? Get our Roaming Clients eGuide.

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