"1. How do our customers bring employees safely back to the office after months of being a remote workforce?" and
"2. What will the new office work environment need to look like to ensure employees feel safe?"
These are two of many questions that businesses are struggling to answer as they begin the process of considering when employees can return to work. We are hearing a lot of organizations are considering moving to a hybrid work environment where employees can work a couple of days in the office and a couple of days at home. This hybrid work environment has the ability to introduce a lot of change. As many IT professionals know, change opens up the opportunity for risks. As employers adopt this new change to a hybrid work environment, there are some critical security considerations your customers need to know about.
- Cloud security: Leveraging cloud with remote workers is smart for multiple reasons, including automatic backups of work and better collaboration. It offers companies the ability to put in controls around documents. If companies do not put those controls around their cloud, there is an opportunity for someone editing the document to introduce malware to it. Anyone else who opens up the file would be affected. Your customers quickly implemented these cloud solutions to support remote users. But it is worth seeing if your customers are taking advantage of all the features included in their cloud subscriptions, and that the features are configured appropriately and securely. Just plugging something in, turning it on and including it in the infrastructure does not mean it is secure.
- Retraining employees: Customers are going to have to focus on armoring up employees who are going to be everywhere. That’s preceded by updating policies and strategies documentation. If you’re an organization that wants to evolve into a hybrid work environment, it’s incumbent upon you to get on top of documenting new policies and procedures to reflect the new reality. Companies are also at risk of violating compliance if their documentation does not match their new reality. Regulators will impose hefty fines on organizations without documentation. After that documentation is updated, there’s an excellent opportunity to proceed into a training mode to resynchronize everybody, because effective organizations know what they do and know who does what and can execute it to secure the organization.
Help guide your customers in securing their new, altered office environment. Abadata's team of cybersecurity experts are here to help secure your hybrid work environment. Learn how we can help your customers assess key security risk areas and provide high-level recommendations to address identified risk gaps in their work environments.
Things to Think About
• Remote Work – As organizations stabilize their remote workforces and, in some cases, make them permanent, sales of firewall licenses, endpoint security solutions, VPN clients and email security will continue to increase.
• Ransomware And Malware – Bad actors seek to exploit your customers’ overwhelmed IT teams, ramping up ransomware and malware attacks. Assessments and penetration testing offer both an entry point to identify areas of opportunity in your customers’ networks, and a great way to provide assurance they’re prepared. Or not.
• Email Security – Email security will also remain important, as almost 90% of threats start with a user clicking an email hyperlink – yet another way to support your customers. In terms of longer-term opportunities and with so many people working from home, consider these:
• Education – Consider further training and enablement to up your skills and prepare your customers.
• Managed Services – Security managed services will continue to grow this year as customers support remote workforces, return to work or some combination of those two models. In addition to supporting the business, most IT teams will be challenged to manage their security and will look to outsource that function. - Need to know more? Talk to Abadata - we're ready to help.