Presented by Field Effect
Increasingly, employees are continuing to work remotely — and increasing your company’s security risks. Protecting your networks, endpoints, and more is a whole new game now. Join this VB Live event to learn about the new security risks and how to meet those challenges.
The hybrid model is taking over workplaces. Employees are increasingly being encouraged to take advantage of cloud-based technologies to work from anywhere, while coming into office whenever necessary. Initially driven by the pandemic, this mixing of remote and office work has proven to increase employee productivity and wellbeing, and many companies are going all-in. In fact, a CNBC survey of top executives in human resources, finance, and technology found that 45% planned to use a hybrid work model for the second half of 2021.
With 83% of employers calling the shift to remote work a success for their company, there are clearly a tremendous number of benefits. But there’s also an enormous risk: No matter the size of your business, these work environments are creating brand new cybersecurity challenges because of a rapidly changing threat surface, cyber security that hasn’t kept up, and a distracted workforce.
The cybersecurity danger
In the rush to put remote work infrastructure in place while concerns about the pandemic grew, the security of these measures was often a second-place consideration. Unfortunately, cyber crime has spiked 600% since the start of COVID-19. About 30% of organizations have seen a spike in the number of cyber attack attempts since the start of the pandemic. And last year, 61% of malware sent to companies targeted remote workers through their cloud applications.
That number is expected to grow. With significantly less oversight and control of how and where employees are connecting, 54% of IT workers are feeling concerned about the harm from future cyber attacks.
Employees who are working entirely remotely can have their connections firewalled away from the rest of the company system, keeping the network safe. However, hybrid workers pose a threat every time they walk into the office and reconnect their laptop to the network, along with any malware they’ve inadvertently been subjected to. In that way, cybercriminals potentially gain access to your users, your network, and your company’s data.
Securing these access points, tracking malicious activity, eliminating intruders, and repairing the damage these cyber criminals creates is an enormous, ever-moving challenge for IT departments, and puts your hybrid work model at risk. That risk will mount as hackers get more confident, their methods of hacking grow in sophistication, and the number of targets grows, along with the number of vulnerabilities inadvertently offered up for exploitation.
Protecting your organization
For many organizations, it makes business sense to commit to the hybrid workplace for the long term. That also means that it makes business sense to evaluate where your current company setup works, and what needs to change, in order to protect your company and your workers no matter where they’re doing their jobs. Here’s a look at the some of your biggest priorities when establishing your new work order.
It starts with developing a cyber security policy and ensuring all in the company are fully briefed and on board. So much of cybersecurity depends on users being aware of how and where cybercriminals can attack, and what leaves them, and their devices, open to attack. It’s essential to educate your employees on the importance of staying aware of the danger, and how to mitigate it, including identifying and responding appropriately to social engineering and phishing attempts, choosing strong passwords, physically protecting their devices, and more.
And there’s much more. To learn more about the cybersecurity risks that come with hybrid work, and how companies can effectively protect their networks, cloud services, and endpoints from today’s most sophisticated attackers, don’t miss this VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
You’ll learn:
- The biggest cyber risks associated with hybrid environments
- Emerging threats for start-ups, scale-ups, and mid-sized businesses
- Steps for creating a secure infrastructure for new work norms
- How to mitigate risk and maximize defense (even if your IT is outsourced)
Speakers:
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William H. Dutton, Oxford Martin Fellow, Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre (GCSCC), University of Oxford
Andrew Milne, Chief Revenue Officer, Field Effect
- Ernie Sherman, President, Fuelled Networks
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Seth Colaner, Moderator, VentureBeat
