When your staff work from home, your security perimeter moves into their houses, and most home setups were never built for business data. This is not a reason to pull everyone back to the office. It is a reason to spend a little attention on the spots where home and work now overlap.
Start with the home network. The router many people use is the one the internet company dropped off years ago, still running its factory password, never updated. That box is the front door to everything in the house, including the work laptop. A few minutes fixes most of it. Change the default admin password. Make sure the wifi uses a strong password and current encryption. Install the router’s updates, or replace it if it is too old to get them. None of this is hard. It rarely gets done because nobody owns it.
Next, separate work from family. The work laptop should be for work. When a teenager installs games or a spouse shops on the same machine that touches company files, the risk goes up for reasons that have nothing to do with the employee’s job. A company device used only for company work is one of the simplest protections there is. If people must use a personal computer for work, that machine still needs the basics: updates turned on, real protection installed, and a separate work login.
Then the connection back to the business. Company data should travel over a protected connection, not plain home wifi at a coffee shop on the way home. Depending on your setup that means a VPN or a secure cloud platform that does not expose your systems to the open internet. Your I.T. provider should make the secure path the default, so the employee does not have to think about it.
Two more easy wins. Multi factor authentication on every work account, so a password stolen from a home machine is not enough by itself. And a quick rule about home printers and personal cloud storage, because a client file printed at home or saved to a personal account is data that has left your control.
This is the kind of setup we standardize for clients at CIO Landing, so remote employees get the same protection they would have at a desk in the office. Remote work is fine. Remote work on an unmanaged home network with a shared family laptop is the part that needs fixing.
If half your team works from home, ask one question. Do their home setups meet the same bar you would require in the office, or did the security level quietly drop the day they started working from the kitchen table?