In today’s work landscape, remote work is on the rise, requiring organizations to adapt security measures.
We want to emphasize the importance of implementing best practices to ensure the security of remote workers.
The Role of VPNs in Remote Work Security Remote employees often relies on unsecured networks, like public Wi-Fi, which poses security risks. Encouraging VPN use is crucial for secure connections. Benefits of VPNs include data encryption, IP address masking, and preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information.
Prioritizing Software Updates Outdated software exposes remote workers to vulnerabilities, making them prime targets for cyber attacks. Regularly updating operating systems, applications, and security patches is essential. Enable automatic updates and educate employees about the risks of neglecting updates.
Promoting Strong Password Hygiene Remote workers must maintain strong passwords for enhanced security. Encourage unique, complex passwords for each account and emphasize the importance of password managers. Educate employees about the risks of password reuse and the benefits of multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Educating Employees about Social Engineering Social engineerings attacks, like phishing and pretexting, are prevalent threats. Increase awareness among remote workers about common tactics used by cybercriminals, such as email scams, malicious links, and impersonation. Provide practical tips for identifying and reporting suspicious activities, emphasizing scepticism and verifying requests.
Implementing Endpoint Security Measures Safeguarding endpoint devices used by remote employees is crucial to protect sensitive data. Encourage the use of reputable antivirus software, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems. Highlight the importance of enabling encryption for data-at-rest and data-in-transit, ensuring remote workers’ devices are adequately protected.
Establishing Secure File-Sharing Practices Remote collaboration often involves sharing files and documents. Educate employees about secure file-sharing practices, such as using encrypted file transfer protocols, avoiding public file-sharing services, and implementing access controls to limit unauthorized access.
Conducting Regular Security Awareness Training Continuous education is key to maintaining a strong security posture. Encourage businesses to conduct regular security awareness training for remote employees. Cover topics like recognizing phishing emails, practising secure browsing, and promptly reporting security incidents.
Maintaining the security of our company is crucial to ensuring that information is always in good hands. At Soffid, we create the security solution that best fits your business model.
The deeper we foray into the Internet Age, the more organizations turn to AI to raise our productivity, improve sales, or enhance our experiences. Now, they are also turning to it to shore up their defenses against the crime that inevitably follows.
As traditional company barriers broke down, and remote working became the norm, the threat landscape rapidly changed, bringing cybersecurity to centre stage for every digital organisation.
To be resilient in this hybrid working paradigm, businesses need to react to this evolved landscape as threats continue to grow both in size and complexity. Threats now exist both from within and externally, from individuals, cybercrime organisations and even nation states. The existing norms of securing organisational IT will not stand to test in this new reality. Enter cybersecurity solutions infused with artificial intelligence, powered by the cloud.
Enterprises that employed “business composability” were more likely to succeed during the volatility caused by the pandemic, according to Gartner. That volatility is here to stay, so now is the time to get ready for it.
Nearly two years after a massive disruption hit enterprises, a few lessons are evident. Some organizations quickly adapted to the circumstances, recognized the opportunities available, and acted to capitalize on them. Other organizations were caught unprepared for the unexpected and struggled to keep going. Some of them shut down.
What separated the successful organizations from the organizations that subsisted or didn’t make it at all? One factor might be what Gartner is calling “business composability,” or “the mindset, technologies, and a set of operating capabilities that enable organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs.” This composability was a major theme at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas, and Gartner is promoting the concept of business composability as the way for businesses to thrive through disruption in 2022 and beyond.
“Business composability is an antidote to volatility,” says Monika Sinha, research VP at Gartner,. “Sixty-three percent of CIOs at organizations with high composability reported superior business performance, compared with peers or competitors in the past year. They are better able to pursue new value streams through technology, too.”
Sinha compares the concept of composability to the way toy Legos work. She told InformationWeek in an interview that composability is about creating flexible and adaptive organizations with departments that can be re-arranged to create new value streams. She says organizations should target the following three domains of business composability:
1. Composable thinking
“This is the ability to be dynamic in your thinking as an organization,” Sinha says. This kind of thinking recognizes that business conditions often change, and it empowers the teams closest to the action to respond to the new conditions. “Traditional business thinking views change as a risk, while composable thinking is the means to master the risk of accelerating change and to create new business value.”
2. Composable business architecture
This is the ability of organizations to create dynamic ways of working, Sinha says. For instance, during the pandemic, some retailers were able to pivot quickly to providing curbside pickup, and some healthcare providers pivoted to providing telehealth appointments.
“Organizations looked at different types of models in terms of delivery,” she says. “In these types of organizations, it is really about creating ‘agile’ at scale, and agile types of working in the organization.”
Sinha notes that digital business initiatives fail when business leaders commission projects from IT and then shirk accountability for the implementation of results, treating it as another IT project. “High-composability enterprises embrace distributed accountability for digital outcomes, reflecting a shift that most CIOs have been trying to make for several years, as well as create multidisciplinary teams that blend business and IT units to drive business results,” Sinha says.
3. Composable technology
This is the IT architecture or technology stack, says Sinha. Technology is a catalyst for business transformation and thinking, and developing a flexible and modular technology architecture enables bringing together the parts needed to support transformation.
Distributed cloud and artificial intelligence are the two main technologies that a majority of high-composability enterprises have already deployed or plan to deploy in 2022, according to Gartner’s CIO Agenda survey. Gartner notes that these technologies are a catalyst for business composability because they enable modular technology capabilities.
Tech investments for 2022
Another major technology at the top of the list of planned investments for 2022 is cyber and information security, with 66% of respondents saying they expect to increase associated investments in the next year.
“Many organizations were dabbling with composability before the pandemic,” Sinha says. “What we saw was that those that were composable came out ahead after the pandemic. The pandemic highlighted the importance and the value of composability.”
Now, as many organizations look to find what is the “new normal,” it’s important to understand that there may not actually be one.
“This type of volatility is here to stay,” Sinha said. With IT budgets higher than they’ve been in the past 10 years, according to Gartner, now is the time to “leverage technology as a catalyst for creating more composable businesses.”
Sources: (1) Informationweek (2) technologyrecord.com (3) Business Insider
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Pre-COVID-19, private and public organizations were on a journey towards a digital business model, travelling at varying speeds. But the scale of the pandemic has forced a dramatic acceleration, both in the speed of change and the required investment in digital transformation.
According to KPMG’s 2020 global survey, organizations are investing heavily in technology to address immediate concerns like falling revenue and interrupted supply chains, and to build longer-term competitiveness and resilience.
t’s a struggle to find many positives about the current coronavirus pandemic, however there are a few interesting aspects that are starting to emerge. Trends that may well bring significant positive benefits as their full impact is felt in the months and years to come. One of these is the likely acceleration of digital transformation projects.
Cyber security and IT operational challenges, cost pressures, risk aversion and the skills gap are all driving the digital transformation agenda. On the plus side, benefits such as innovation and improvement of products and services, efficiency and an uptick in organizational agility are all expected outcomes.
Why Will COVID-19 Accelerate The Pace Of Change?
As vast swathes of the workforce shift to remote working and pressure increases to enable digital delivery of products and services traditionally rooted outside the online space, the pressure to be a truly digital organization will only increase. Organizations of all shapes and sizes will face renewed commercial pressure to negate the downsides through digital transformation and realize the benefits it offers in order to remain viable.
We are in a time where COVID-19 has transformed the future of business forever. Organizations from all sectors globally have been focusing on transforming digitally to ensure that the needs of their organization, customers, citizens, patients, and greater stakeholder community are met. The move from physical and on-premises to digital was critical to ensure organizations’ survival through COVID-19, as well as setting an example for potential challenges that may occur in the future.
There are very few industries unimpacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, retail is an industry that has seen Digital Transformation skyrocket. With the breakneck pace of change required for retailers to compete for business online further compounded by the influx of bricks-and-mortar businesses to e-commerce due to global restrictions and lockdowns, full-scale Digital Transformation very quickly became inevitable.
All this is to say that the conversations in business have shifted rapidly over the past year to a unanimous understanding that digitization of services in addition to industry disruption due to rapid advancements in the technologies available to businesses are now changing the shape of commerce forever. Businesses that want to keep up, or survive in reality, will need to transform radically – not just digitally, but in mindset too.
Over the last few months, the way we interact with services has changed. Many of us are now fully ‘remote’—not only are we working from home, but also learning, shopping, exercising, and other day to day activities.
We’ve all had to adjust. But for companies in particular, it’s raising questions about how to maintain business continuity. Unable to conduct business as normal, many have turned to alternative solutions and business models. Restaurants have started providing food deliveries, gyms are offering virtual classes and even hairdressers are offering tutorials online to help people cut their own hair.
These alternative solutions will likely require some form of digital innovation or optimization. In some cases, it’s fast-forwarding digitization processes that businesses were already exploring, and in others, it’s bringing to light new ones which hadn’t been considered.
What does this mean for a post-Covid world?
With many businesses turning to alternative digital solutions now more than ever before, will there be no going back once the Covid pandemic has passed?
If digital solutions are more convenient, offer a better user experience, and are more scalable for businesses, why would we then revert to time-consuming, inefficient manual or face to face processes? Are we seeing a glimpse into the future, where digital processes dramatically improve the way businesses function, and the way they serve customers?
We’re familiar with new tech start-ups, for example challenger banks, using digital processes to their advantage. But we may see more digital processes taken up by traditional services, such as mainstream banks, hotel check-ins, voting and car rentals.
One thing to keep in mind with digital transformation however, is that as it develops, we risk widening the gap between those who turn to digital options and those who don’t. Not only could this impact businesses, but we must also consider customers who might find it more difficult to use digital alternatives, for example older generations.
However, if done right, digital transformation could help secure the future of many companies. The pandemic has highlighted the fact that businesses around the world need to become more flexible and more digital. And that through doing so, it could ensure that they emerge from the Covid pandemic stronger than they were beforehand.
Sources:
(1) KPMG
(2) Deloitte
(3) CioInsight
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As more businesses turn to remote work, many are asking themselves, “What security issues come with working remotely?”
For most businesses, there are these top 4 security issues with working remotely:
Phishing scams
Unsecured endpoint devices
Home office risks
Network security
Whether you’re new to remote work or have been telecommuting for years, it’s important to understand how working from home affects your business’ cybersecurity. While certain cybersecurity protocols remain the same whether your office is virtual or not, other defenses need to be altered to fit the home office environment for all employees.
Learn what makes remote cybersecurity different, top security issues businesses face, and how your organization can protect itself below.
Regardless of whether workers are remote or not, all employees should understand their personal role in maintaining your business’ cybersecurity. It only takes one wrong click on a phishing email to cost your business hundreds of thousands—or even shut your doors for good.
If most or all of your employees work from home, the responsibility of each individual increases tenfold.
That’s because instead of maintaining cybersecurity standards across one office, standards must be maintained across as many offices as there are employees. Often, these security protocols must be upheld without the help of on-site IT support or management as well.
To achieve the best outcome, managers and IT teams should help teleworkers implement and practice proper cybersecurity whenever possible. Ultimately, however, much of it comes down to individual responsibility. When it comes to security issues with working remotely, teleworkers must understand how and why they contribute to their business’ overall cybersecurity.
Network security refers to the cybersafety measures taken to protect your company’s entire computer network. Your network security could include cloud computing, proactive cybersecurity tactics, segmentation, and more.
Your business may already be protecting its network with some of these or other cybersecurity strategies. If most or all of your employees are suddenly working from home, however, some of your company’s security measures may need to be rapidly revised.
For instance, if your company typically employs a user privilege system, those user authorizations might need to be updated now that workers aren’t in a shared office space. Or if your data is currently stored on external servers accessed through an internal network, you might attempt to move this data to a new storage location.
But changing how you protect your network can lead to unforeseen problems, new vulnerabilities, or security gaps. Under normal circumstances, such changes can be carefully planned, executed, and monitored. When circumstances dictate hasty change, however, your security could be at risk.
How to Protect Against Security Issues While Working Remotely
When it comes to mitigating or resolving the security issues of remote work, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. The exact cybersecurity measures your business needs will vary based on your organization’s size, operations, assets, and many other factors.
With that said, there are several best practices that can aid in improving remote cybersecurity for many different companies. Soffid is the solution to access information as your were in the office. Have a look to the following interesting video were our CTO, Gabriel Buades, tell us about how Soffid can secure your company data while teleworking.
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