If the past year has shown us one thing, it’s that the time-honoured, traditional work situation is not entirely necessary. The old norms of work life have now become an ancient life form in terms of how and where our teams operate.
While many businesses remained operational and successful due to their ability to sharply adjust to change, it may seem tempting for companies and employees to retreat back to how things were prior to March 2020. But, if businesses continue with this fresh new perspective on the ‘new age of office’, they can emerge as leaders.
As more and more employees in all sectors have managed to be productive from the comfort of their newly appropriated home office, the term bring your own device (BYOD) has fast become bring your own environment (BYOE). Making remote work sustainable and seamless is important to the health of employees and to the satisfaction of customers, but what about company security?
Employees bringing entire environments to work such as desktops, laptops, and mobile devices - even if they are using an employer’s device - that are all connected to a personal home network that also hosts smart speakers, security cameras, virtual assistants, and more. Along with the fact that if there are multiple people in a home that are connected to the home’s router, this creates multiple opportunities for potential cyber attacks. Operating outside of an organization’s secure architecture brings risk when workers bring their own environments, opening the door to cyber attacks and data breaches and becoming a permanent part of the enterprise attack surface.
The sudden transition to remote work, and the unforeseen ease at which it played out, may have caused some businesses to overlook the need to establish security policies and protocols. So we have compiled the most crucial steps that an organization can take to create a strong secure remote environment and protect from a range of attacks.
The BYOE movement can be an excellent option for businesses and a great recruiting tool that offers flexibility that the old office norms did not. But the devices, operating systems, and networks used in your team members' homes are more vulnerable to network threats that are less common in the office. So it is crucial that all organizations have a solid secuirty plan.