Offices in prior decades were built primarily with an on-premises state of mind. In order to do work, you had to drive to the office, work on a desktop or stationary computer, and authenticate locally to your on-prem Active Directory^® or LDAP server.

Beyond the fact it doesn’t easily accommodate remote work, the on-prem model has other downsides, including forcing admins to manage multiple different passwords for applications and connect their users to WiFi via an unsecured passphrase like WPA2. As technology evolved, cloud applications, varying operating systems, and disparate resources became more common in the workplace, and they challenged the on-prem model as well. 

Desktops evolved into laptops, installed versions of applications became web browser-based, and WiFi protocols evolved to become more secure. Offices, too, have started evolving to allow for work-from-home or multiple remote branch offices. 

JumpCloud^®Directory-as-a-Service^® was built to allow employees to work remotely from home, on the go, or at a remote branch office. This is made possible with a 100% cloud-based directory and secure solutions for the various IT resources at your company’s disposal. 

General Security Best Practices

When working in any IT environment, especially environments with remote workers, there are several things you should consider configuring and enforcing. This guidance applies whether you are using JumpCloud or not, so we’ll go through this before going through JumpCloud-specific guidance.

JumpCloud^®Directory-as-a-Service^® was built to allow employees to work remotely from home, on the go, or at a remote branch office. This is made possible with a 100% cloud-based directory and secure solutions for the various IT resources at your company’s disposal.

Strong Password Policies: 

Different security compliance regulations may require different levels of password complexity. For example, section 8.x in the PCI DSS 3.2.1 compliance requirements recommends the following list be enforced on passwords used in a secure environment: 

• Minimum of seven characters, generally 10 characters or more is best
  • Numbers
  • Lowercase and uppercase
  • Special characters (examples: . ! ; _ -)
• 90-day password expiration
• (Read more…)