- Databox Solutions
Table of Contents
Travelling Overseas and Need to Do Some Work?
You have thought about the laptop, the power bank, the eSIM or roaming activation. But have you thought about how you will securely access your business systems from another country?
Planning an overseas trip where you will need to do some work? Most people pack the tech and sort the connectivity, then assume everything else will just work when they land. It usually does, which is exactly the problem. If your business systems are reachable from anywhere in the world with nothing more than a password, they are reachable by anyone in the world with that password.
Microsoft 365 email, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, CRM applications, even on-premises file servers and NAS devices. Accessing any of these from overseas introduces additional cyber security risk. Many cyber threats originate from outside Australia, so a login attempt from a foreign country should be a red flag, both to your security monitoring and to anyone reviewing the alerts.
How We Handle Overseas Access at Databox
At Databox, security is taken seriously. To maintain the controls required for our ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications, I have to notify our Systems Administrator, Cameron, before I travel overseas. He reviews our security policies against where I am going and enables approved access where it is genuinely needed.
It takes a few minutes before the trip, and it means I can keep working productively from another country without weakening the protections we have in place around our business systems. That is the balance worth aiming for: access that is deliberate rather than default.
For many businesses, the sensible starting point is to block overseas access by default, then run an approval-based process for the staff who genuinely need it while travelling. Access is granted for the trip, not left open permanently.
Six Questions to Ask About Your Own Environment
Whether you are travelling next month or just want to know where you stand, these are the controls that decide how exposed your business systems are when someone signs in from overseas:
- Do you have Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) enabled? A stolen password on its own should never be enough to get into your email or files.
- Are Conditional Access policies in place? These set the rules for who can sign in, from where, and on what device.
- Do you restrict access from high-risk countries? Blocking regions your team never works from removes a large share of automated login attempts.
- Are devices required to meet security standards before accessing company data? A managed, patched, encrypted laptop is a very different risk to a personal device or a hotel computer.
- Do you monitor and alert on unusual sign-in activity? Someone needs to see the alert when a login lands from a country nobody is visiting.
- Do you have controls around access to sensitive business information? Not every staff member needs access to every file, from every location.
Together these layers make sure only authorised people, on trusted devices, can reach your business systems, even when they are halfway around the world.
Not Sure What Is Currently in Place?
If you cannot answer those six questions with confidence, now is the time to ask, ideally before someone books a flight. A review of your environment can identify the gaps while they are still just gaps, rather than after they have turned into a costly problem.
Databox Solutions is a Brisbane-based managed IT provider, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certified, supporting small and medium businesses across Queensland and Victoria. All client data stays in Australian data centres, with no offshore processing.
Travelling soon? Tell us where your team is heading and what they need to reach while they are away. We will tell you what to lock down and what to enable for the trip.
Talk to Databox about reviewing your remote access and cyber security controls, so your business stays protected and your team stays productive.
Book a remote access and security review 1300 603 404
