Tips for Securing Your Home Office

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve discussed ways to add security to both your your basement and your living room. As those posts demonstrate, every area of your home comes with its own security concerns. Specifically, basements often receive very little security consideration, making them particularly easy to breach. Meanwhile, living rooms sit in full display of the street, possibly advertising valuable items for all to see. Furthermore, people often drift off to sleep in living rooms, making it important to add some life safety in these areas. Today, we shift our focus to an area of your home that also requires some special attention in the form of home offices. These rooms contain valuable electronics, as well as sensitive documents and client information. For these reasons, customers often need to secure this room even against those already in the home. Today, we show you some ideas for securing your home office to help address this unique room in your house.

First, we’ll detail the importance of installing quality, interior lock hardware on your office door. From there, we’ll move on to a discussion on some specialty alarm-related equipment you can install in this room. Then, we’ll detail the importance of installing a safe to keep important documents and any other items safe from the eyes (and hands) of thieves. Finally, we’ll look at how installing home surveillance can create valuable office security as well. Now, let’s dive in with a look at some quality lock hardware you can install to secure your home office!

Install Interior Lock Hardware

Our post 6 Ways to Improve Door Security should help you hone in on how to make your office more difficult to enter. While that post focused mainly on exterior doors, consider using those same concepts to create home office security. Adding a doorknob with a lock, or even a deadbolt, means that anyone entering the office now needs a key to do so. This can make it harder for guests or anyone already in the house to intrude on your home office. It also helps add security in the case of a break-in. Burglars do not like to spend more than a few minutes in a home. Any bit of security that makes their next move more difficult can minimize the damage done by a break-in.

A keypad smart lock adds additional office security and tracking information. In addition to making office doors more secure, these locks can track which code was used to unlock it, and when. You can also use your phone to unlock these doors. This is very handy if you want to let someone in the office for a brief period of time, but do not wish to give out a code. No matter what type of lock option you choose, we always recommend adding locks to office doors to provide additional security. Now, let’s shift our focus to securing your home office through the use of security system sensors.

Take Advantage of Alarm Technology

Burglars often look for money, electronics, and valuables while inside a victim’s house. This makes office security a special priority for two reasons. First and foremost, offices often contain these items, making them a specific target for burglars. In addition, the presence of such important items means that an office break in would create even more damage than a typical home burglary. For these reasons, we often suggest adding additional security system devices to home offices. A dedicated office motion detector, for example, can provide a closer watch over your office electronics than a centrally located motion detector in a hallway or other central location. Adding window sensors to office windows can catch potential burglars even more quickly.

In addition to making it harder to enter an office, you should also add equipment to track entry to the office even when your security system is disarmed. We’ve outlined several different uses for contact sensors in our post on Unconventional Uses for Contact Sensors. In this case, adding contact sensors to all office doors (as well as on drawers and closets within the office itself) allows you to track people entering the office and even track them within the office itself.

This is especially helpful when used in tandem with an interactive cellular dialer, such as ours powered by Alarm.com. Now if anyone opens an office door, you will receive an alert on your smart phone that lets you know. You can also receive an alert if someone leaves the office door open. If you do not receive an alert, you now have the peace of mind that when you go back to your office, everything will be as you left it. Next up, let’s see how you can use safes to add an extra measure of home office security.

Secure Your Work Documents

Safes can hide and shield the things that burglars covet most when they break into an office. People often use safes to keep money, important records and documents, and valuables such as jewelry or antique coins out of the wrong hands. Because offices often contain these items, many of our safe installations take place in offices. Make sure to follow our 10 Best Practices for Safes while choosing and installing the safe as well. Many people make mistakes during this process that hurt office security more than helping it. For example, buying a safe but failing to bolt it down to your floor simply invites burglars to walk off with your safe in hand. Doing this ensures the loss of both your safe and your valuables with potentially very little effort on the intruder’s part.

Of course, the presence of a safe in the room can attract immediate attention. If you plan on storing relatively small items in your safe, consider purchasing a wall safe.  To install a wall safe, we cut a square hole in the drywall and install the safe itself between the wall studs. You can then use a picture or mirror to cover the safe. This setup makes the safe both hard to find and hard to steal without a great amount of effort. Other safes have their own specific purposes. Fire and burglary-specific safes, for example, are designed with exactly those threats in mind. Some safes offer security against both fire and a tool or torch attack by a burglar. When choosing a safe, keep in mind both what dangers you wish to guard against and what items you wish to lock up. Now, let’s look at one final step you can take towards securing your home office effectively.

Install Interior Surveillance to Put Eyes on Your Office

Cameras can add security to your home in many ways, which is why we included them among our Important Security System Add-Ons for Your Smart Home. Adding cameras to watch your home office has multiple benefits. A home office surveillance system will keep an eye on your most valuable equipment, records, and valuables at all times. If anything does go wrong inside your office, you will have the ability to see exactly what happened and when. Furthermore, we can connect your surveillance system to your home’s internet network. While away from home, you can always use your cameras to look at your office in real time. Any computer, smart phone, or tablet will provide this ability at any time.

In addition, your camera acts as a theft deterrent. Whether inside or outside of your office, cameras do a great job scaring away potential thieves. Of course, preventing a crime is very much preferable to helping solve one that’s already been committed. Cameras can certainly help prevent a burglary, and if worse comes to worse, help you catch those responsible.

Putting it All Together and Securing Your Office

We hope that this post helps your efforts in securing your home office. As always, we encourage you to contact us with any questions this post may raise for you. We will happily answer any and all of your security-related inquiries. Furthermore, we also invite you to take advantage of our free site survey program. We’ve long offered complimentary security audits and equipment quotes to both new and existing customers alike. During our visit, we can address any and all of your security concerns. Additionally, we can make suggestions of our own based on observations of your property made during our visit. Together, we can create a complete security plan to keep your home, your most valuable possessions, and your family as safe and secure as possible!