Many employees are now adapting to their new home-working environment. Organisations have had to implement IT strategies to allow employees to access files and communication tools remotely, but the sudden increase in this new way of working has opened up the real risk of more security breaches. Business continuity planning is demanding cyber security networking precautions, to ensure the workforce remains both secure and productive.
Attack surface expands
Following the sudden rush to set up remote working, many organisations are struggling to align to the new working environment of a hybrid or multi-Cloud environment. With increasing numbers of people logging in remotely, or connecting to Cloud-based applications, the attack surface widens. This makes it a lot harder to manage, and hackers are taking advantage of this. Some organisations are already set up for employees to work remotely, but won’t have predicted the potential security risks associated with hacking of company devices.
Security is a business problem, not just an IT one
If organisations didn’t know this, they do now. The subject of security needs to sit at the board level, it’s not just another project that resides with IT. Cyber security impacts organisations of all sizes, and a data breach is a matter of when, and not if. Larger organisations often have budget and initiatives aligned to cyber security, but for smaller organisations this is isn’t always accounted for.
Employee education is key
Cyber security awareness for your workforce is critical. As organisations try to adapt daily to changes in government demands, the need to cascade good working practice to your employees is a race against time. Basic tasks such as password management and saving files onto central, secured applications, logging onto a secure network at home and enabling automatic updates lessens the risk of employees losing valuable data. It also reduces the inevitable burden on IT teams (who may also be working remotely). If employees can stick to these principles, IT departments can invest more time and resource on mitigating security risks
What type of security support is available?
An array of free information is available to help support organisations. This should be shared throughout the business via internal communication channels, to ensure a clear concise message is delivered to every employee in a timely manner. If staff are equipped with the right knowledge of basic security tasks, it will help them hold the fort, and enable time and resource to be allocated to more sophisticated security prevention measures.
Organisations should also know that security support services are available, and don't cost the earth. Before looking elsewhere, businesses should consider what cyber security needs they wish to address, and ask themselves the right questions around areas such as staff training and incident response plans.
Register for our webinar – Cyber Security Measures to Keep Your Business Running
To provide you with some support to help tackle these challenges, we are teaming up with our security partner, Alert Logic, to offer insight into the threat landscape in its current condition.
Join Justin Young, Advanced’s Director of Security and Compliance, and Will Morrish, Vice President and General Manager, EMEA at Alert Logic, at 2pm on Thursday, 16 April. They will discuss why work from home policies have caused a surge in threats, and explain what measures you can introduce to defend against them.
