There has been a 238% increase in cyberattacks post the adoption of remote work by companies and employees worldwide. (Source: Alliance Virtual Offices). Yes! Cybercriminals see a feast of opportunities in today’s remote work era preying on mission-critical and confidential enterprise data.
More than 60% of employees are working remotely today accessing critical business data on the go from disparate locations, says a Gartner study. This includes full-time employees, vendors, freelancers, contractors, and partners.
Read also: Uber suffers major cyberattack, sensitive data of millions exposed!
According to IBM’s Cost of Data Breach Report 2022, the average data breach cost saw a steep rise of $1 million whenever remote work was a causative factor or a remote employee was involved. More people are working remotely than ever expanding the attack surface. This is why remote workforce security is a top priority for businesses.
Here’s how IT and security managers can secure their remote workforce in today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape.
- BYOD security: Deploy a powerful UEM solution to mitigate complexities and risks involved in securing and managing all your critical mobile devices and endpoints.
- Secure access to managed applications: Deploy a Zero Trust Security Model to ramp up your organization’s security posture.
- Advanced threat protection (SIEM): Leverage advanced threat intelligence for up-to-the-minute protection from sophisticated threats including new strands of Ransomware.
- Employ a VPN & Data Encryption: Encrypt data and communications with a powerful data encryption tool.
- Secure privileged access: Deploy a powerful identity and access management solution coupled with strong mobile multi-factor authentication and risk-based authentication and access policies powered by AI.
- Incident response and business continuity plan: Ensure to have a robust incident response and a backup plan in place.
- Ensure automatic security updates: Invest in vulnerability assessment and pen testing to detect and identify unknown exploits in your network, database, web applications, servers, devices, and all digital assets.
- Cybersecurity Awareness: Employees need to have a clear understanding to identify and report phishing attacks. Organizations need to communicate with employees about best security practices and hygiene policies.
- Seek expert help: Getting help from a trusted managed security services provider is a huge win here to keep threats at bay.
Remote working is here to stay and so are new-age cyber threats. It is therefore important for businesses to make cybersecurity a top priority for remote workforce.
Don’t let your workforce fall for the bait! Get help now!