A lot changed in 2020, especially with COVID forcing many of us to work remotely for the first time. It’s been a tough year, and we could all use a vacation. Fortunately, your new remote work skills could empower a much longer trip. With the right tools, you could have a fun, secure, and efficient working vacation that you and your employer will love.
Benefits of Working Vacations
For the Employee
You probably already have your own list of reasons to work from the road, but here are a few favorites.
- Longer, more peaceful vacations: You don’t need to cram all of the fun into a few days when you can work from your favorite vacation destination.
- Choose your surroundings: Most of us don’t do our best work in an office. You can select between a distraction-free hotel room, a creativity-inspiring park, or whatever your ideal workplace is.
- Never miss out: The next big project could come down the pipe at any time. In the pre-digital age, you had to be physically present to accept an assignment, but distance isn’t as important as it used to be.
For the Employer
Companies also have much to gain by allowing longer, working vacations.
- Higher employee retention: Longer vacations make employees happy, and happier employers are less likely to feel the need to seek out new opportunities.
- Employees are never out of reach: Crises don’t happen on a schedule, so it’s good to know that your experts can access critical systems at any time from any place.
- Less office space: Office space is expensive, so empowering remote workers offers the opportunity for significant reductions in overhead.
Technology for the Remote Worker
It’s not a vacation if you have to lug around all kinds of hardware. Your laptop and smartphone will take care of everything, although a battery pack never hurts. Software solutions will handle the rest.
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- Backup file storage: Traveling with your work laptop is risky. You need to ensure that your files are backed up as frequently as possible, and that backup can’t also be in your luggage. Secure cloud storage or in-office servers are much better solutions.
- Text Communication: In the office, you can walk over to your co-worker’s desk. Email is useful, but it doesn’t replace those real-time communication options. Solutions like Slack or Microsoft Teams maintain team communication via text.
- Video Communication: Text is good for quick discussions, but some discussions require a more interactive mode of communication. Many messaging apps offer video, and Zoom and Google Meet offer dedicated video communication services.
Security and the Remote Worker
It’s hard to beat the internet security of the office. The company can lock down its own network as tight as is necessary. When employees work from their home networks, the number of networks involved rises from one to dozens or hundreds, and those home networks are only as secure as the employees’ equipment and tech-savvy.
If that doesn’t worry you, imagine trusting the security of every Wi-Fi hotspot and every hotel network that each employee visits on vacation. That’s the baseline security level for the remote company, and it’s exactly as bad as you think it is.
Aren’t VPNs Secure?
Virtual private networks (VPNs) are popular solutions to the remote work security dilemma. They encrypt the connection between networks, creating a private and secure tunnel for data to pass through. However, a tunnel is only as secure as its least protected entryway, and VPNs don’t secure the tunnel entrances — the devices and networks that remote workers use.
Zero Trust Security
You should treat any random Wi-Fi connection like what it is: an insecure network full of untrustworthy computers. This is the idea behind the Zero Trust model implemented by technologies like SimpleWAN @Home. Zero Trust architecture puts up a barrier between your work device and the rest of the network, Where VPN security only covers the interior of the network tunnel, Zero Trust makes the tunnel entryway as narrow as possible, blocking anyone but you from entering.
Vacations Shouldn’t Be Stressful
Remote work should decrease your stress levels, and that means you shouldn’t have to deal with clunky technology solutions. And you certainly shouldn’t spend your entire vacation worrying about whether you are leaving the company’s network open to hackers.
Schedule a demo of SimpleWAN @Home to discover how to take simple and reliable Zero Trust security everywhere you go.
