For the last blog in our Work from Home series, we touch on a very sensitive matter. There is one thing that is on everyone’s mind when employees work remotely: Security. In the past, we have posted some helpful tips on keeping your personal internet safe. How do we protect the internet connection of employees working from home, and on the flip side the confidentiality and privacy of the company they are employed with? This question leaves a lot of employers scratching their heads, but luckily there are some easy ways to secure your, and your employees, IP networks.

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t!

By far one of the most popular security preferences, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a service that works like a cloak of invisibility – it protects your privacy online, and thus your internet connection. It’s fairly simple how a VPN works: It creates a cloak-like encryption for your data. Through this encrypted cloak, your online identity is protected as it hides your IP address, like being hidden in plain sight. An added bonus is that it allows you to use public Wi-Fi safely. For those days when your employees are working from a coffee shop, local library, or rental home, they will be able to work without any worries they are compromising work or risk exposing log-in credentials.

Home, Safe, Home

It is absolutely crucial to keep your home network secure. Think about the information you are entering like credit card numbers, bank accounts, and social security numbers. Even if you caught some fraudulent activities immediately, you will still have to deal with the headache that comes with changing passwords, closing cards, and contacting customer support to help you resolve the issues. This takes precious time away from you. It’s a pain to deal with when it is your personal information that gets hacked, but it feels worse when it happens to your employees while they work. Thankfully, routers these days are not only competitively priced but come with firewall features that you can – and should – enable. We also have a great video on how to configure Dynamic DNS in a router.

Drawbridges and Secret Passwords

Typically, companies have a central server that has a list of verified users that are allowed access, including remote employees. It doesn’t matter if your employees are working in the office five days a week, from the comfort of home, or only a few days in the office at a time, everyone enters the same login info. How do they do this? Companies can log all of the IP addresses that will need access to the server and therefore only accept connections from those trusted IPs. Furthermore, if your company has a dynamic IP and needs employees to connect from a remote location, and if the firewall supports a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), then you can use a DDNS hostname. When your company is running an update client, it will keep the hostname’s IP address up to date and the firewall will still give you access while it is blocking other IPs. Much like a medieval castle, the drawbridge does not allow people to pass through unless deemed worthy, but on a much more sophisticated level – as well as less manpower!

Experts say…

Here are some tips, tricks, and suggestions that our No-IP developers have to say about VPNs and keeping your network safe:

The creator and CEO of No-IP, Dan Durrer, shares, “I just have a generic LTTP IPsec tunnel, it’s kind of nice because it works with the built-in VPN client on iOS and mac OS. I configured it once on my Synology, and another currently is in my Ubiquiti Dream machine.”

Our VP of Platform and Chief Architect, David Jonas, says “Wireguard is the modern method for VPN.  Lots of clients these days and tutorials. Very easy, secure, high-performance way to connect back to your home network.”

One of our Product Managers, Deven Reza, suggests OpenVPN as a VPN recommendation.

Stay on Defense

Although No-IP doesn’t have any fancy security products to go along with our various Dynamic DDNS and related products, there are so many easy and seamless ways to incorporate security measures that will keep your company’s IP network, as well as that of your employees, safe. These simple measures will help protect you from prying eyes and fraudulent activity on a consistent basis. Staying consistent and staying vigilant are best practices not just for your employees, but for your company as a whole. There is nothing wrong with working on the defense when it comes to your IP network security – If anything it is the safest and smartest way to go about it!

Update: Donations for Food Drive are now closed, but don’t let that stop the giving spirit! Click here to donate to the Food Bank of Northern Nevada.

For the ninth year in a row, No-IP is hosting its Giving Thanks Food Drive to benefit the local community.  The Giving Thanks Food Drive will benefit the Food Bank of Northern Nevada, a local non-profit organization that is dedicated to helping feed more than 130,000 neighbors in need in our community, in which half of whom are children and seniors. Last year, we were able to raise over $3,000 for the food drive!

Donating is easier than ever. Simply follow the link provided and donate any dollar amount, even $5 can help feed a family in the Reno, Nevada community.

“We are honored to continue our support of the Food Bank of Northern Nevada. No-IP is dedicated to giving back to the community that has been our home for over 15 years. This year is more important than ever. As food prices continue to climb, resources at non-profits are stretched very thin. We hope to raise over $5,000 this year and are asking for our employees and customers to help in this great cause.” stated Jason Puccinelli, VP of Operations.

Want to help? To donate to the Giving Thanks Food Drive, please follow this link: Holiday Season 2022 Virtual Food Drive

Donations will be accepted until December 20, 2022.

ABOUT NO-IP:

Since its founding, No-IP has grown to more than 30 million customers and is the preferred choice for dynamic DNS. No-IP provides powerful, useful, and reliable services to home users, small businesses, and members of the Fortune 500. From Dynamic DNS to Managed DNS and other integral domain products, No-IP delivers trusted products that help people stay connected to their devices and ensures that the domain and related services are fast, safe, and always available.

It is easy to take the Domain Name System (DNS) for granted. It is something that performs so quietly and seamlessly that so many people don’t even know what it is. DNS is not exactly something that family and friends talk about with passion around the dinner table. (Except if you work at No-IP) However, DNS is exactly what saves people during Black Friday shopping, staying connected with loved ones you’re unable to break bread with, or frankly just being able to enjoy some alone time when you need a break from all the social interactions. DNS is what makes all our searching and researching on the internet possible from looking up Thanksgiving dinner recipes to which stores have the best holiday deals. Without it, we’d be banging our heads against our computers and phones trying to figure out the IP addresses of all our favorite websites.

Let’s take a look at some reasons to be thankful for DNS:

• Instead of dragging yourself out of bed before sunrise to wait in line in your PJs to go holiday shopping, you can shop online from the comfort of your cozy and warm home. You don’t even need to leave your bed!
• You can stay connected to friends and family across the country or on the other side of the world – These days, it is not uncommon to video chat with your loved ones during dinner or throughout your party.
• Traveling for the holidays means being away from home. Being able to peek in at any time at your home security cameras helps you not only keep an eye on things but also makes for a relaxing and stress-free vacation.
• Football season is in full swing during Thanksgiving, and you can place those last-minute bets knowing that those websites are being hosted reliably and are equipped to handle the surge in traffic. When placing bets, timing is everything!
• No one likes waiting in line, whether you are at the store or sitting at home on your computer. Online retailers will have dependable access to Point of Sale (POS) devices, which means you don’t have to wait in line all weekend to purchase all your great deals for everyone on your gift list.

All of that reliability with a fast and easy set-up.  If you’re not using a Managed DNS service provider, set aside some time over the holiday weekend to check it out.

There is a lot for No-IP to be thankful for, as well!

• The spirit of giving – No-IP was able to give back to the community in a number of ways this year by sponsoring local events, contributing to scholarship funds, and donating funds to local non-profit organizations. During December, we are also hosting our 9th Annual Giving Thanks Virtual Food Drive and will be hosting an event to benefit a local animal shelter.
• Staying in the game – No-IP celebrated its 23rd birthday this year! So much has changed in two decades, but what hasn’t changed is our mission statement.
• Our team was recognized with some pretty cool awards this year!
• Growth is good and we have experienced more growth this year than ever. We have added new members to our team for Development, Customer Success, and Marketing.

Taking time to give thanks and appreciate what we have is a great way to embrace the holiday season. At No-IP, we are so thankful for our amazing customers that we are excited to announce that on December 20th, we will be kicking off our 5 Days of No-IP. It is chock full of giveaways, amazing deals, and offers, so stay tuned for more information.

Companies have embraced the Work from Home (WFH), or work hybrid model that many have decided to keep these avenues for their employees. Employers have found that employees are not only thankful but working successfully. The ability to not only stay safe but also have a better work/life balance has given employees a new vigor for work and an enthusiasm to stay at their current company.

As an employer, it might be a little scary at first trying to figure out how to support and maintain your employees’ access to internal networks and devices. Thankfully, No-IP has some products and features that can help:

Enhanced Managed DNS Service

First thing is first: you will need to make sure there are enough hostnames for your employees to access your devices such as your Network Access Storage (NAS) or internal network server. Whether you have a number of employees ready to access these devices remotely, or you are anticipating a growing number of employees that will soon need access, it is good practice to have these things in place and the ability to add users quickly so that no one experiences any downtime. Although No-IP has a robust free package with lots of great features, Enhanced Dynamic DNS and Plus Managed DNS packages allow you to create additional host names as your company grows so you are only paying for what you need. Not only will you have a means of access for your employees to access internal data, but you also have a means of ensuring they will always be connected.

DNS Monitoring

Although this service is typically used for businesses that want to ensure that their sites are up and accessible to customers, it can certainly be applied to ensuring your employees have access as well. Monitoring is fairly simple: It works by checking your web services remotely. If the monitoring service can get to your site, database, FTP server, etc., and verify it’s working, Monitoring will log its result and continue. Should it get a bad response from your service, or a slow response, Monitoring will then notify you of the problem. No-IP offers basic and advanced monitoring packages that you can pick between depending on what you’re looking for. The Advanced Monitoring service offers enhanced features the Basic package provides, AND Failover Support. The Failover Support is the key feature for Advanced Monitoring – Should your service go down you can have all your traffic diverted to another IP address, website, or to a custom web page stored on No-IP’s servers. When your service comes back up online, Monitoring will undo the failover settings and normal operations will continue. When you have employees working remotely and around the clock, ensuring they have access is not just necessary, it is crucial.

Load Balancing

If you find yourself running a company that is getting a lot of traffic due to more remote users trying to access your servers or customers visiting your site, then you would be a perfect fit for Round Robin DNS. This type of advanced record is used by companies with a lot of users and customers clamoring into their servers. Instead of bogging down one IP address, you can route different users or customers to different IP addresses and thus balancing the load of traffic. Load balancing is a way of managing, but also preventing any IP network issues caused by the rush of traffic.

No-IP Special Features:

Some of the best WFH aspects of No-IP come from our basic features:

Unlimited Queries

Texting these days is one of the basic ways we keep in touch with anyone from friends and family to work or even your doctor’s office. Texting has been such a common way for us to communicate with one another that it is almost unfathomable that we all used to pay for each text sent and received! Slowly, but surely, phone companies have increased the limit of texts a person could send in a pay cycle until unlimited texting became not only the norm but the standard. The same goes for queries to your devices. It would be counterintuitive if you told your remote employees to work within the confines of a number of queries to your servers, which might be like limiting the number of times you want customers to visit your site. With unlimited queries, you don’t have to worry about any repercussions about the number of queries so long as your servers can handle the traffic. This is a breath of fresh air considering there are a lot of other companies that seem to still be practicing the “old texting” method with customers.

Data Privacy

Privacy is crucial when thinking about your internal data, especially if you have employees accessing it remotely numerous times a day. There are a number of cloud server companies that also provide Managed DNS services. In the short term, this may be convenient for you and your employees to have one place to store and access your internal data. However, passing data through a cloud server means your data is stored and potentially accessed through security breaches, thus putting your company, and your employees, at risk. At No-IP, we merely serve as the connection between you, your users, and your IP network – That is it. Therefore, your data stays secure and private.

As we embrace remote work to be a common way of being part of the workforce, we can do so with the right tools to set us all up for success. Turning toward the leaps and bounds that technology has to offer and the limitless possibilities can only make us more hopeful for the future.

Just a few years ago, the concept of Working from Home (WFH) was mainly a privilege. A lot of people had to endure long commutes, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and juggling work/life balance. However, after the last few years of enduring multiple lockdowns and quarantines, WFH has become not just a luxury, but a necessity. Whether you are the primary caregiver in your home or would rather not lose a few hours of your day banging your head on your steering wheel in traffic, WFH has allowed a lot of workers to be able to get their life back while still being happy and productive employees. More and more companies are not only accepting WFH but embracing it by allowing employees to work from anywhere, not just from home. The results have been nothing but monumental and have forever changed the modern workforce.

In this series, we are looking to you as the employer of a new work style. As an employer of a small business or a growing startup, you might be between continuing support for employees working from afar, or ramping up to allow them to do so in what is now our “new normal”. When it comes to your IP network, you’ll want your employees to easily access everything they need so that they can continue working without any hiccups.

Below are some examples of devices that you can use to connect via No-IP:

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

A NAS is a device, typically used by small businesses, that connects to a wireless router and consolidates storage in one place. It supports archiving and backup, and allows users to share and access data remotely from anywhere, even via a mobile device. A NAS device can hold a variety of different things like audio and video files, websites, and Microsoft Office documents, and is commonly used as a storage filer for the work cloud. This is a great place for employees to access anything internal documents or projects that you are still collaborating on. Check out this full tutorial on how to set up a Synology NAS device and use No-IP to access it remotely.

Cameras

There are so many reasons to install cameras in and around your business or office buildings. Fortunately, there are so many different types of brands of security cameras, and each includes a long list of cool and fancy features. Sure, you can install cameras that are hard-wired to a modem in a nearby location that you could always access physically. However, these days people want to be able to not only check up on their locations but also be alerted if there are any disturbances or if someone is where they are not supposed to be. Being able to access and pull up a live feed from your cameras at any given moment is both crucial and liberating, especially as a business owner.

Digital Video Recorder (DVR)

A DVR captures video digitally and saves it to a hard drive. These can be hooked up to analog cameras with a coaxial cable, thus making them remotely accessible. DVRs go even further and do more than just record video – DVRs can also have cool features like searching for specific events, times, or dates. If you or any other users need to take a peek into who was in the office, any customer that came through your storefront doors, or any funny business in or around your properties, then this is where you would pull it up. Sure, there are cloud storage options on the market, but keeping this type of information private is extremely important not just for record-keeping, but for security measures as well. We have a tutorial for configuring a HikVision Camera and using a Turbo HD DVR to save the data.

Work Computer

Another method employees can do is directly access their work computers remotely. Work computers that are on site are already outfitted with all the security features. First, the computer needs to be accessed remotely via software or an app and then using VPN to ensure they have approved access. As long as the computer at work stays on, then your employees can easily access it. Ready to setup your computer to access it remotely? This tutorial will help you learn how.

You might be thinking, does it matter the type of device you are trying to connect with via No-IP? And the answer is, no! It doesn’t matter if you are trying to remote access a work computer, or a security camera in your warehouse – The process is all the same and extremely simple to set up. If you add your employees as hostnames or users, then they will have access to any of these devices. Furthermore, with our Managed DNS service they can count on continuous access without any intermittent issues. If you are still scratching your head, you could always reach out to our Customer Success team to help you further. Ready to create your No-IP account and start using our Dynamic DNS to access your devices remotely? Get started now.