During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, close to 70% of full-time employees were working from home. Now, in 2022, 35% of employees have the option of working remote full-time, while 58% have the option of working remote at least one day a week. With so many organizations composed of a hybrid workforce, it’s critical for yours to implement the right technology and security controls to protect that workforce.
Without a roadmap that identifies and prioritizes your organization’s challenges and plans around technology, your employees will start looking for workarounds. For example, if your organization hasn’t implemented a cloud storage solution, your employees might end up creating personal Dropbox accounts that don’t have proper security controls configured. Because services like these are beyond the control of your organization, it can increase the risk of a sensitive data leak.
Next steps
Implement a secure VPN: A VPN allows your employees to have access to everything they need to do their jobs whether they’re at the office or working remotely. Make sure you protect your VPN connection with multi-factor authentication, which requires employees to authenticate a second set of credentials to gain access. (Example: To sign into the VPN, they enter their email password and then a code texted to their mobile phone.)
Migrate legacy file servers and applications to the cloud: Cloud-hosted data is accessible anywhere, which makes it great for hybrid and remote workers. By migrating your physical office environments to cloud solutions — ones that you control and can configure security around — you enable employees to securely access data from wherever they are working.
Use business communication technology: Make sure to implement technology that enables voice, video and text communication between users from anywhere, as well as allows secure file storage and sharing across your organization. This includes options like Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace and Webex Teams.
Implement conditional access policies and mobile device management: By setting access policies, you help ensure employees have access to what they need and not every bit of data your organization produces. With mobile device management, you can also help ensure that certain workers have access to sensitive data from external devices.