More than 83% of businesses call the shift to remote work a success for their company. But these work environments are also creating new cybersecurity challenges because of rapidly growing threats and attacks.
The hybrid model is now taking over traditional workplaces. Employees are increasingly encouraged to utilize cloud-based technologies to work from anywhere while coming into the office whenever required. After the pandemic, the continuity of remote and office work has increased employee productivity and wellbeing, and many companies are going all-in.
According to Gartner, Inc, worldwide spending on information security products and services exceeded $114 billion in 2018. For 2019, they forecast the market to grow to $124 billion and $170.4 billion in 2022. With 43 % of all cyberattacks target small businesses rather than large businesses. The good news is that cyber security firms can help you lessen the chances and secure your confidential data, whether you are a small or large business. In the meantime, here are some basic cybersecurity guidelines that can help you safeguard your business from cyberattacks online.
Advanced Security Conversations within Your Company
Initially, it would help if you assured that the culture within your company encourages security. If it is not in your employees’ range, then you are at high risk. Technologies cannot help employees that leave gaps that hackers can exploit.
Encourage your employees about safe cybersecurity practices, and you need to hold them liable for their actions. You can do this by building a cybersecurity policy and allocating it to all the employees. This plan should cover how to detect threats, instructions for making secure passwords, and describe how employees are granted access to the internet at work. The policy should explicitly restrict personal use of the internet, so there are no grey areas that leave employees to make poor decisions.
Market forecasts for cyber insurance policies range from $14 billion by 2022 to $20 billion by 2025, up from less than $1.5 billion in 2016.
In addition, the policy should draft who should manage security threats and the proper chain of contact if an employee something that can be problematic. The cybersecurity policy also needs to explicitly draft how any sensitive data is handled to ensure that it always remains protected. This may involve restricting access to sensitive data to specific employees or approved departments.
Encrypt Your Data Regularly
The best way to secure your company data is by encrypting the data multiple times. There is no wrong time to encrypt data as you will never regret stepping forward, but you will regret revealing confidential data if you fail to do so at an inopportune time.
Encryption safeguards that even if a third party accesses your data, they will not read it because they are not able to present the proper authorization. Encryption helps keep sensitive data safe and protect that all emails and files sent between employees are not interpretable. Threats occur when there is a breakdown in encryption somewhere along a work chain. Taking one extra step can always help protect your company and employees.
The Cybersecurity Threat
In a rush to put a remote work structure in place while caring about the pandemic, the safety of these measures was often a second-place consideration. Unfortunately, cybercrime has fastened 600% since the start of COVID-19. About 30% of organizations have seen an increase in cyber-attack attempts since the beginning of the pandemic. And last year, 61% of threats transmitted to companies targeted remote workers by their cloud applications.
The number is growing with significantly less oversight and control of how and where employees are uniting, 54% of IT workers feel concerned about the harm from future cyber-attacks.
Employees working completely remotely can have their connections firewalled away from the remaining company system and protect the network safely. Whereas hybrid workers pose a threat while in office and reconnect to the network, with any threat, they have recklessly been subjected to. Whereas cybercriminals likely gain access to your network and your organization’s data.
Protecting these access points, tracking malicious activity, eliminating intruders, and repairing the damage these cybercriminals create is a huge, ever-moving threat for IT departments and puts your hybrid work model in danger. That risk will arise as hackers get more confident, their hacking methods evolve in composure, and the number of targets increases, along with the number of vulnerabilities involuntarily offered up for exploitation.
Secure your Organization
Microsoft Corp. will invest more than $1 billion each year in cybersecurity for the foreseeable future. Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft, recently wrote that cybersecurity is the central challenge of the digital age.
For many companies, it creates business sense to execute to the hybrid workplace for the long term. It also makes business sense to evaluate where your current company setup works and what needs to change to protect your company and your workers, no matter where they’re doing their jobs. Here’s a look at some of your significant priorities while building your new work order.
It begins with generating a cyber security policy and ensuring all in the company are fully briefed and onboard. Cybersecurity depends on users being conscious of how cybercriminals can attack. It is essential to train your employees on the security measures and how to mitigate them, including analyzing and responding appropriately to social engineering and phishing attempts, choosing strong passwords, physically protecting their devices, and more.
The EndNote
The bottom line is that change in IT is relentless right now. While cybersecurity threats have always been a significant risk, the current scale of that risk is unprecedented, which is why we’re now seeing data security overload on a grand scale. Embee helps you overcome your security concerns with a wide range of advisory, stand-alone, and end-to-end Infrastructure Security Services. We provide various security solutions, such as:
- Perimeter Security
- Network Security
- Server Security
We help our customers build secure hosting architecture and manage security systems end to end, keeping them updated and protected from potential vulnerabilities. Designing and Implementing Security architecture with our in-depth understanding of on-premises/cloud/hybrid systems, we help growing enterprises build layered lock-down security architecture.
