Many have stopped counting the days being in home office. Although some companies are already gradually resuming their office presence, there are still many employees remaining in home office to effectively minimize the risk of infection at the workplace. In addition to occupational health and safety, data protection was a major concern – how can this be guaranteed when working at home? Many security managers have taken up this pressing question and provided their employees with practical recommendations on how to behave in order to protect sensitive data even in this exceptional situation.

You should know these basic rules on data protection

In principle, the following rules should be observed:

  1. Work in a separate room if possible. In multi-person households, you should avoid working in common rooms such as the kitchen, living room and dining room.
  2. Always keep internal and confidential documents locked and do not leave them unobserved. This in particular applies if you cannot work in a separate and lockable room. Do not carelessly dispose of working documents in household waste.
  3. Only connect to your company´s network via VPN, and lock your laptop if you interrupt your work. Make sure you have appropriate password protection at home as well.
  4. Only use devices that are approved by your company. This applies in particular to printers and scanners, but also to other IT components such as external hard drives and USB sticks.
  5. Always adhere to your company's policies in order to comply with the principles of information security and data protection.

GDPR applies – also when working in home office

In principle, the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are not invalidated even in times of home office. Here too, the employer is obliged to take appropriate measures to ensure the protection of personal data. Especially now, when a certain home office routine is established in many places, awareness measures are more important than ever. This is the only way to ensure that personal and other sensitive information remains protected and that the current crisis does not turn into a data protection crisis for your company. Security Island supports you with professional e-learning solutions.