Security Challenges with the Rise in Remote Workforce

Employees are beginning to experience a new normal at their offices after the lockdown, where everything seems to be a far cry from the traditional security protocols. Irrespective of the industry, IT teams were engaged in removing the creases and making the lives of employees working remotely more comfortable.

The IT teams of most of the companies have stayed busy throughout the COVID-19 lockdown as they were managed the mass migration to remote working, maintaining virtual communications, and fixing all types of technical issues that disrupted the supply chains. IT teams played a vital role in sustaining businesses through one of the most challenging phases.

Shielding Against Cyber Attacks

Apart from all the other business-focused tasks, IT teams were engaged in warding off cyber-attacks. According to cyber experts, traffic due to malicious emails rose sharply from 12 percent to 60 percent in just 6 weeks, since the beginning of March. The remote working setup presented the hackers with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to exploit the multiple user access points.

However, since the easing of lockdown restrictions, the IT teams face completely different types of challenges. Even though the workers are returning to their respective offices, this is not under the same old security perimeter. IT experts believe that cybersecurity threat perception and their monitoring will be even more challenging. It is partly because of the increased dependency on SaaS tools, which will witness a rise in the next couple of years as more and more remote workforce start using these cloud-based services and tools.

Security experts are facing substantial changes in the workforce, and to guard the enterprise network, they have to understand each employee’s access level. They also need to understand when to give access to whom and the level of access that needs to be provided. Now, this is a huge issue for companies as security, and even compliance gaps keep popping up in the mad rush for maintaining business continuity. These issues need to be mitigated quickly by the IT teams as things can get out of hand once vulnerabilities within the network get exposed.

Businesses are already facing a steep climb as far as economic recovery is concerned. So, they’re going to give higher priority to security issues. IT teams will certainly be deployed to quickly identify and resolve all the security issues plaguing the corporate IT network. Long-term stability is possible only when a robust and appropriate identity is put in place. TechRepublic indicates that companies need to assess the potential dangers and determine techniques for mitigating them.

Quick Response Approach

As the number of remote workers kept rising, and a mass shift was noted, it posed a huge challenge to the IT teams. Time was never a luxury that companies could afford. So, they took a quick response approach to get the employees ready to work from home as soon as the lockdown was imposed. There wasn’t an option, and the teams had to reach the functional level quickly, which implied that access could be gained much quickly.

Several organizations that never had anything more than basic management for access and provisioning were caught napping. Things went haywire in the absence of the right tools and proper access to audits and poor IT teams’ knowledge about every employee’s roles and responsibilities. All this is giving rise to security and compliance gaps as companies are in a rush to get their remote workforce functional quickly. IT teams need to mitigate these challenges without further delay.

Change in Workforce

The workforce in several organizations is undergoing dynamic changes due to the pandemic. Restructuring of the workforce is a common phenomenon in many companies, including furloughing, redundancies, and reduced work hours.

People are returning to their offices, and roles are being reassigned. Several workers have been reassigned to new roles or have been shifted to contractual work. Now, IT teams have to stay on top of this fast-changing and dynamic workforce and determine who is moving in and out of the company network. They will also have to ascertain the access levels of each employee as well.

Safeguarding the network by using the latest tools

Regardless of whether the employees work from home, return to their offices, or undertake new roles and responsibilities, governance will always play an essential role in securing the enterprise’s perimeter. Tools like VPN will come in handy in securing communications and providing a safe channel for all enterprise communication. Whether employees use a home network or log in to their systems from public Wi-Fi, the end-to-end security offered by Atlas VPN privacy will help protect all the data packets. Hackers and scammers won’t be able to gain access to your information, and crucial enterprise data can be secured.

It’s imperative that IT teams stay alert to avert unwanted hacking attempts and secure the enterprise’s perimeter to maintain business continuity.