Staying Safe & Being Comfortable on a Business Trip

When going out on the road for a business trip, you take your laptop with you. It’s necessary to find a place to work and to get set up for presentations in conference rooms too. When you’re driving to the location, you can pack more with you than when flying. Being comfortable while on the road is partly about how much you travel with and staying within your limits.

Here are some tips on staying safe and being comfortable when away on business.

Keep Your Laptop Secure

Find a place to lock up or secure your laptop when it’s not with you. This could be a PacSafe bag to keep it inside a steel mesh case beneath a canvas exterior and securing the bag inside a hotel room. It might mean asking the hotel to store the laptop in their safe if it’s large enough (not all of them are).

You should have your laptop protected by encrypting the data on the hard drives. This way, even if the laptop is stolen, the thief will have trouble getting any meaningful information off it. Doing so protects the company’s data and any personal information too. Identity theft is a real issue for business executives on the move as they are popular targets, so this thwarts these attempts.

Being Productive in the Hotel Room

If you’re planning to work in the hotel room or use the laptop during a presentation, you might think about bringing along a monitor riser. Perhaps you travel with a separate LED screen to use on the riser, but you can also position your laptop on a monitor riser too.

The riser gets either the monitor or laptop off the desk level. This avoids it suffering from an accidental liquid spill which could mean disaster when away from the head office. Unlike a stand, it doesn’t need to be fixed in place. It also provides extra airflow to keep the tech gear cooler in hotter climates.

Backup Thumb Drive

It’s necessary to anticipate IT failures and deal with them. The failure could have been caused by a hack that took out your BIOS or bootloader where the PC won’t boot any longer. In any case, when you’re on the road, the last thing you want to deal with is a PC that’s inoperable. That will cripple your plans.

Backup essential files on a USB flash drive. These can be password protected and encrypted to keep the data safe from prying eyes. It’s unlikely that you’ll lose the use of the flash drive and the laptop at the same time. If you have to purchase a laptop locally to get back in action, then a flash drive filled with a few GB’s of data is going to get you up and running on your current projects immediately. Quick enough for a presentation to out of town clients or to complete a research project without missing a beat.

Private Cloud Storage

Also, don’t forget private cloud storage. Here larger files and research materials that cannot fit on a flash drive may be stored. The cloud might be encrypted, but it’s also a good idea to separately encrypt your data with a private key before uploading too.

Security is important when away on business. It’s easy for things to slip past you, so the best measures are preventative and ones that will rescue you should the worst happen. Being prepared is the key to recovering quickly.