The trend was already in place and the Covid-19 pandemic response has accelerated it immensely: working from home for some or all of the working week is becoming a reality for more workers in an increasing number of industries.
The benefits to businesses of reducing office space costs are clear, even if the intangible benefits of collaboration and engagement in the same physical space as colleagues is undeniable. We will all need to adapt…
With workers increasingly home-based, the lines blurring the use of personal and professional devices such as laptops, smartphones, tablets etc. will get even more indistinct, and with that comes potentially greater risk to security of assets, data and intellectual property. The ability to control: what employees are able to download and install, the sites they visit, the data they store, the files they are sharing etc. will be decreased, and this will be spread across all the devices they use. Policies are clearly important, specific device builds will be needed and network access must be secure, but the sheer number of opportunities for these to be compromised is enormous for many companies
So, is it time to have that delayed review of your cybersecurity status? Do those patches sitting outside your list of priority IT projects need bumping up the stack? Did the learning from your last cyber-attack, however limited at the time, get implemented? Even: are your cybersecurity staff happy and motivated, or is there a bit of a ‘Cinderella syndrome’ in place? I.e. cybersecurity is a job that everyone knows need doing but is taken for granted.
There will come a point where manual intervention to try and deflect a detected attack will be too late. These days there are sophisticated cybersecurity tools available that use artificial intelligence to speed up the response to attacks. These attacks are getting more sophisticated and used by an increasing number of actors: nation-states, cyber gangsters, disgruntled ex-employees and loners in bedrooms around the world. Do you have the skillsets and experience needed to look at the horizon and prepare to defend against the wave?
