Only 30% prepared to secure a complete shift to remote work

The biggest security concerns facing businesses are data leaking through endpoints (27%), loss of visibility of user activity (25%) and maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements (24%), DTEX Systems reveals.

These concerns are followed by access from outside the perimeter (23%) and remote access to core business apps (18%) such as email and collaboration.

Few companies prepared to secure and support a shift to remote work

The report also found that only 30% of companies surveyed were fully prepared to secure and support a complete shift to remote work and 50% reported their company will continue to support work from home capabilities due to increased productivity and business benefit.

According to Gartner, “In response to COVID-19, many organizations rapidly moved their employees to remote work where possible. In the short term, restrictions in some form will remain, but this pandemic has demonstrated the validity of remote work. This will bring a long-term need for a sustainable strategy to support the business and employees as many transition to ‘work from home’ (WFH) permanently.

“With this, leaders, managers and supervisor have called for a greater ability to monitor remote employees beyond what may already be in place. With the advent of even greater monitoring capabilities through new technologies, there is much that can be monitored.”

Key findings

• Nearly 75% of organizations are concerned about the security risks introduced by users working from home
• 73% of organizations reported they have partial or no visibility into user activity if their VPN is disabled by remote workers; only 27% reported full or complete visibility into user activity
• Users are mixing personal use and corporate use on their work laptops, increasing the risk of drive-by-downloads (25%), users are more susceptible to phishing attacks at home (15%), and organizations no longer have visibility since most remote workers operate outside the corporate network (13%)
• Organizations prioritize human-centric visibility into remote employee activity (34%), followed by improved network analytics (30%), and next-generation anti-virus and endpoint detection and response (25%).

“Securing the remote workforce is a critical priority for business as we enter the new year and organizations must continue to identify and protect against security threats during these challenging times,” said Bahman Mahbod, president and CEO of DTEX.

“Employees have a role to play as they assume more responsibility and act as a human firewall to protect themselves and their organization.

“The findings in our Insider Threat Report released this fall highlighted the lack of adoption and ineffectiveness of network and endpoint cyber security, employee monitoring and data loss prevention tools and suggested that organizations need to prioritize the human-element and workforce behavior in relation to data, process and machines as a pillar of their next-generation security and IT technology strategies,” added Mahbod.