While the floodgates of remote work have certainly opened up during the crisis brought on by the current pandemic cybersecurity appears to be pulling the breaks and rightfully so. While cybersecurity teams have tried to slow down the floodgates of vulnerability they are also credited for scaling up support to remote work set-ups. The struggle to find the right balance between security and flexibility has been a particularly challenging issue in the remote work set-up according to 41% of business leaders surveyed.
70% of surveyed employees consider the ability to continue telecommuting crucial in their next job choice. On the consumer side, 75% say they will continue maximizing digital transactions. Cybersecurity teams and leaders are now tasked to stay ahead of this curve, embed, and engage cybersecurity in designing the normal of the workplace.
Home wifi security, phising scams, and insecure passwords are some of the most common work from home cybersecurity issues faced by companies and employees today. This is simple enough to address with the proper training of the remote workforce, adopting cloud-agnostic, and scalable network security solutions. Security experts across the industries are chiming in on how to scale up efforts in protecting client data while promoting a flexible and pandemic-proof remote work set-up. From the use of secure machines, to IPsec and VPN, to secure remote connectivity, and endpoint security.
Employees who consider telecommuting crucial in their next job
Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) in tandem with other business leaders are advised to focus on three priorities, not all of them technology-related. In the end, this is still all about people and work cultures. Security concerns should also be within the context of actual security requirements of your business or clients.
- Staying in touch with people. This needs to be re-emphasized—in the end it is about people. People need to be prepared to the transition. The capacity to be flexible and secure needs to be top of mind in this next normal of business operations.
- Assess and close security protocol gaps in your work from home set-ups. Go through some fundamentals like identity and access management, device management and peripherals, information security, app readiness, VPN or internet and Office 365 connectivity.
- Accept the need for securing the remote and distributed work models for the long-term. Accept that it is here to stay and therefore the need to continuously assess and develop the remote work model for productivity, flexibility, and security is paramount for any business to thrive.
Security solutions are now coming in with the new flexibility that remote working has introduced. Firms are now coming around to realising the the growth potential offered by outsourcing grounded on cybersecurity considerations.
