Step up Your Game for Hybrid Work Security

Since the beginning of 2020, companies have struggled to predict when office life would return to "normal."

Reality check: such a total turnaround is becoming improbable, and the majority of firms are adapting to the fact that some kind of hybrid employment is here to stay. This creates transformative difficulties for how enterprises may safely expand the work environment while maintaining the adaptability required to respond swiftly to unpredictability.

Even by mid-2020, when many felt the end of the COVID-19 pandemic was approaching, 80 per cent of firm executives intended to enable workers to work remotely at least part of the time following the epidemic, while 47 per cent planned to allow employees to work from home full-time.

Evaluating Problem Areas, Opportunities, and Goals

Legacy technologies were not designed for the developing future of work, particularly hybrid work. They expose businesses to greater security concerns.

As they approached the second year of the COVID problem, Computerworld said, "organizations have learned that they need to enhance the capabilities of their current security infrastructures in ways that they may not have contemplated prior to the work-from-home transition. This involves ensuring that corporate security processes and solutions that reinforce and defend a company's perimeter may include a wider variety of geographic locations to accommodate home offices."

Too often, organizations have reacted to emerging security challenges with a hodgepodge of solutions, adding new solutions by integrating them with previous systems. This adds to the difficulty of responding swiftly to a new danger since it increases the level of complexity. With a cloud-first strategy, service provider platforms are continually updated, lowering the requirement for software updates by a significant margin.

Focus on Individuals

According to a widespread cliche among IT and security providers, humans are the weakest link in the security defensive chain. 36 per cent of security events in 2020 will entail personnel falling prey to phishing or other non-malicious security policy breaches, according to IDG survey data. This year, 44 per cent of all security incidents occurred, despite the fact that almost half of the security executives emphasized security training and awareness for their employees last year.

It is undeniable that hackers have identified employees as a very simple target for virus distribution. Unmanaged devices, hackers, and insecure networks represent the biggest threat to remote and hybrid work models, according to a study by IDC. The majority of workers, however, are not IT or security professionals and are, therefore, focused on their duties rather than ongoing cyberattack surveillance.

Modern Times Demand Modern Equipment

It is insufficient to just adapt old work tools to more contemporary designs. Typically developed for on-premises systems, these products lack interaction with the growing variety of cloud services that employees depend on. They are not suited to deal with the complexity and automation that cybercriminals might use against their targets.

Frequently, organizations keep data on-premises and depend on cloud-based security technologies, or vice versa, with extra latency that impedes quick reaction to attacks and provides new links for attackers to exploit in the security chain.

Security must be vital as firms grow on-premise and cloud services infrastructures to enhance business processes, promote innovation and seek new possibilities, as enterprises across all sectors strive to digitally transition.

Security must be effective, but it must also promote employee productivity. Maintaining secure productivity has always been a concern, but never more so than in the wake of the abrupt shift of the workforce.

Download Google Workspace's whitepaper to learn more about Stepping up Your Game for Hybrid Work Security only on Whitepapers Online.