Remote working has become commonplace for organisations across the globe, with businesses and their employees adapting at overnight speeds to digitalise processes and ways of working. With this rapid trend, IT professionals and CIOs have to navigate a new cyber-risk landscape, with increased vulnerability to cyber-attacks and data breaches.
As an independent member of HLB, it has been interesting to see how the network is responding to these digital advancements and the ways in which world-wide organisations are approaching the virtual workplace.
For Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2020, HLB surveyed 76 IT professionals about their perceptions on information security and data protection in today’s environment and discussed the cyber-risk landscape with the experts. This produced a report full of findings, from views about prioritising urgent concerns, through to ways of strengthening your cyber-risk management strategy.
A key chapter of the report details the ‘Lessons Learned from Lockdown’. Proving hindsight really is a wonderful thing, being able to look back at how businesses handled the virtual shift has allowed experts to extract valuable findings in order to develop the cyber-risk management strategy, continuing to build on the common themes of agility and resilience.
The five lessons are as follows:
1. Improve cybersecurity training and support
It takes a 360-degree approach to manage cyber threats. Workforce training ranked second in terms of priority as indicated by our respondents…
2. Do not wait to prepare IT infrastructure and cybersecurity protocols
While 42% of IT professionals claim the IT infrastructure and cybersecurity protocols of their organisations were well prepared for operating the business remotely, the majority stated they were somewhat prepared (45%) or not at all prepared (13%) for lockdown...
3. Think long-term relief not short-term solutions
Organisations did not anticipate the length of time the workforce would be working remotely for. While data availability was the first concern, now as remote working looks like it’s here to stay, data security needs to be strengthened…
4. Regularly assess cloud computing threats and vulnerabilities
A recent study by Oracle reports that two-thirds of senior executives say cloud native is integral to their firms’ competitiveness. The way we are operating today and accessing data is different from the way we were working a year ago…
5. Addressing cyber risk is an organisation-wide exercise.
A current top priority for IT professionals is doing an internal risk assessment. But don’t limit conversations to only business leaders. It’s essential to start a company-wide conversation about the three tenets of information security…
It seems as though remote working is here to stay and so businesses must plan for the future, adapting and overcoming various security hurdles.
To find out more about the lessons learned and to download the full report, visit the HLB page here.