Mobile workforce? Here’s how to keep your work devices safe and secure while travelling
There are dozens of ways to damage a work laptop: spilling liquid across the keyboard, dropping it on the ground, or allowing it to overheat when you accidentally block the air vents. With more and more workforces moving to hybrid working environments, your employees are likely toting their devices from work to home, to the coffee shop and beyond. This means the chance of them accidentally causing permanent, lasting damage to their devices is higher than ever.
Thankfully there are a few key steps you can take to make sure your employees' devices remain safe and secure. Let’s dive in.
Protect their devices from overheating
While your office retains a perfect, climate-controlled temperature throughout the year, your employees are taking their devices out of the air conditioning and into the Aussie summer heat. Whether they’re sweating away in a hot box apartment, leaving their laptop on the seat of their car, or keeping it in their bag as they venture out and about, letting your devices overheat can have adverse effects.
Unfortunately, laptops need to be kept cool as much as possible so that they continue to perform at their best. Encourage your workers to turn off their laptops when they leave work — rather than simply allowing them to enter power save mode, or ‘go to sleep’ — and to keep their device with them, rather than leaving it in their car.
If you suspect that they may be migrating from desk to couch or bed while they work, educate them to not place the laptop directly on a soft surface, such as a pillow, so that the air vents are able to operate properly without being blocked. If your team includes designers or video editors who might be overloading (and therefore, overheating) their devices, invest in a cooling pad that can help regulate their laptop’s temperature.
Invest in protective, waterproof cases
With the third year of La Niña on the horizon, your workers’ devices are at risk of damage from surprise rain soaking through their bag and onto the device. There’s an easy solution to protect your employees’ devices from water damage: invest in waterproof cases, and ensure they are used at all times.
Water-resistant laptop sleeves are easy to buy and incredibly effective for preventing moisture — even heavy humidity — from getting in and damaging devices. As a bonus, most protective sleeves add some extra protection from being dropped or dinged.
Prepare for the possibility of device theft
It’s essential that you not only protect your employees’ work devices from accidental damage, but also from the possibility that it could be stolen while they’re out and about. While losing a laptop is costly to your company — after all, it’s an expensive piece of equipment! — it also poses a high risk to your company’s digital security. To protect your workplace data, it’s essential that you require each employee to follow basic security measures like:
- Regularly backing up data so files aren’t lost forever
- Enabling tracking features
- Protect all logins with two-factor authentication (2FA)
- Set a screen lock with a password or passcode that comes up fairly quickly during a period of inactivity
Finally, if you’re researching protective cases for your employee devices, it might be a good idea to buy a case that has a lock, or can be secured via a cable to protect against thieves.
Choose devices with enhanced security features
If you have a mobile workforce, even the strictest policies and procedures can’t protect you from human error. For this reason, it’s important that you equip your team with devices that are designed to protect their information while they’re out and about.
HP notebooks and ZBooks come standard with enhanced features, like a feature that automatically locks your laptop’s screen as soon as you walk away from it, and HP Sure View, which ensures others can’t view your screen when glancing over your shoulder.
Finally, the new Elitebook 800 Series and ZBook Firefly come with built-in Tile technology. This means, if you accidentally misplace your laptop, you can easily find it with the Tile app — even when your device is turned off. Your workplace also has the option to upgrade your Tile technology to include proactive security features, such as Smart Alerts for greater peace of mind.
At Counterparts Technology, we’re a proud HP Gold Partner, which means we can provide exceptionally secure device fleets to our customers — all tailored to your unique needs and requirements. If your employees are regularly toting devices from home to work and everywhere in between, it’s essential that you invest in devices with the best security features. Counterparts Technology continues to work hard to supply a diverse range of high-quality hardware and software to our clients, such as the full range of HP devices with Intel®.
If you’d like to chat more about how our partnership with HP can benefit your business, we’d love to chat. Get in touch with the team at Counterparts for more information.
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