Organizations are simply not designed to work remotely. For decades, the workforce in Europe has been rooted in a repetitive day-to-day business – a full working day with hectic commuting on both sides. The COVID-19 pandemic has turned this model on its head, and masses of workers are now demanding more flexible work policies from their employers in the long term.
About the author
Roger Benson is director for EMEA at AMD.
With vaccine adoption across Europe gaining traction, and with many predicting a return to “normal”, the workforce is unlikely to return to the office on a full-time basis. Hybrid models – a flexible approach that allows employees to combine work from different locations (at home, on the go, or in the office) – are expected to become the norm.
For a more flexible future
With homeworkers consistently working more hours than non-homeworkers, individuals are increasingly striving for better work-life balance beyond the pandemic. According to a recent UK government report, 57% of workers said they care about flexible working hours, while 92% of Generation Y workers – people born between 1980 and 2000 – saw flexibility as a top priority.
Many already have a plan for their employees to work from home one or two days a week, and some have even given them the option to work remotely on a permanent basis.
A difficult intersection
While all signs point to a future of work that combines working from home with time in the office, this puts employers at a difficult crossroads. Employers know that data breaches are much more likely when employees work outside of the office. This is backed up by figures from the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), which show that in 2020, more UK companies are affected by security breaches or attacks at least once a week than in 2017, up by ten points.
At the same time, the same employers need to give their employees the confidence, confidence and tools they need to be flexible about working wherever they want.
There are numerous safeguards IT leaders can take to mitigate this risk, from ensuring employees receive adequate cybersecurity training to providing anti-phishing protection. Companies that have had to adapt quickly to this new way of working must also ensure that the protective measures to protect teleworkers during the pandemic are no longer temporary and are suitable to support flexible working on a long-term basis.
Most importantly, companies need to be sure that they are investing in technology that meets the needs of their employees – so that they can work productively, collaboratively and, most importantly, securely against hackers.
Stronger measures
The first step that should be taken is to ensure that employees have a virtual private network (VPN) installed on their laptop so that they can enjoy the same security that is offered to them in the workplace anytime, anywhere. In the office, workers are typically surrounded by multiple rings of security – from email and gateway security to frequent software updates and on-site security support – and it’s important to make sure that preventative measures are in place when working remotely . After all, the riskiest cyber threats are those that have not yet been recognized, which means that prevention is the ultimate cure.
Cloud security is another important area that organizations need to address to ensure that employees can be trusted to work remotely. Video conferencing services, for example, have become extremely popular during the pandemic, but they are by no means infallible; There have been known cases of threat actors gaining access to video conferencing, especially as more and more people are working from home networks. With this in mind, companies need to take stricter security measures, such as: These include checking meeting links, requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA), and most importantly, ensuring that employees are working on devices that have adequate security measures in place.
Evolving Threats
Opportunistic hackers have dramatically changed the way they work as a result of the move to mass remote working – something that is likely to continue as companies embrace a hybrid way of working. As laptop employees work on home networks, phishing attacks have become more popular and become the most common cybersecurity threat, as well as massive and simple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Not only do hackers use these techniques to lure employees into disclosing sensitive data, but they also inject data-harvesting malware, such as remote access Trojans, info-stealers, spyware, and banking Trojans, to divert money and create botnets. With this in mind, companies need to ensure that employee laptops can ward off these cyber threats and prevent access to corporate data. Secured-Core-PC, a Microsoft initiative supported by AMD, enables employees to boot laptops with robust security features to ensure they are protected from firmware vulnerabilities and unauthorized access.
Missing laptops
Obviously, with the warming weather and pubs reopening soon, an employer’s home network is not the only risk hybrid working businesses can face. By allowing employees to work in cafes and beer gardens, there is a risk of corporate equipment falling into the wrong hands; A laptop has been found to be stolen every 53 seconds.
When a laptop is lost, software-based full disk encryption (FDE) is usually the first line of defense to protect user data, but it has limits and ultimately leaves data open to hackers. An effective way to protect your data is to encrypt your system memory. This means that if a laptop falls into the wrong hands, it cannot simply bypass disk encryption by accessing the keys stored in memory.
As companies decide how they’re comfortable with working flexibly, whether to maintain the status quo or encourage employees to return to the office more often, it is clear that some form of hybrid working will persist. When executives pursue a long-term plan, it is important that companies not only make the right policy decisions, but also make the right technology investments so that employees feel empowered and trusted to work safely no matter where they are.
source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/the-hybrid-workplace-a-question-of-trust-or-risk/
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