67% of IT pros concerned with teleworking endpoint misuse

43.13% of workers will stay remote after the pandemic ends and two out of three IT professionals are concerned with teleworking endpoint misuse, a new Prey study reveals.

The report examines the remote work challenges generated by the pandemic year and the number of people working from home far from corporate environments, on insecure networks, in many cases sharing with other unsafe devices in their homes.

“As the pandemic hit in early 2020, organizations had to cope with the new reality of a remote workforce,” said Norman Gutiérrez, Cybersecurity Researcher, Prey Software. “Our survey found a whopping 75 percent were unprepared for this rapid shift and that endpoint security had become one of their top priorities.”

Remote work presents IT challenge

The report finds that, on average, 43.13% of workers will stay remote after the pandemic ends. They join the 63% of workers who already had some sort of remote policy implemented before the pandemic to create a vastly expanded remote work force.

In this new remote environment, IT professionals surveyed worry about the lack of IT infrastructure to allocate resources to suddenly remote workers, followed by employees using third-party software, increasingly overwhelmed IT staff, and not having enough devices for everyone.

Lack of budget is a big concern too, as well as dated infrastructure and IT personnel without the necessary experience.

Of the IT professionals surveyed:

• 62% stated that threats increased after the pandemic started
• More than 50% strongly agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic and remote work has made cybersecurity a greater challenge, while 41% somewhat agreed.

Teleworking and endpoint misuse

The report identifies endpoint security as the bread and butter of the new cybersecurity landscape: a way to secure remote office devices while also maintaining a minimum level of security for the data in transit.

Data encryption solutions are highly appreciated too, to deliver protection to the static data on every endpoint. In addition, remote work must happen in tandem with cybersecurity education for workers and frequent endpoint checkups.

Accordingly, the report finds:

• 67% of IT professionals surveyed stated that endpoint misuse grew in some way or another in their organizations
• 44% are worried that, with more liberal B.Y.O.D. policies, personal devices are being used in the workplace without risk assessment.

Identity and access management are a necessity for more than half of the surveyed organizations as well. Software management sits right in the middle, a necessary evil in a remote world. Backup and web filtering are in dead last, only relevant to a third of surveyed professionals.