TALKING business
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The face of business has changed dramatically in recent times , with new figures from Roy Morgan research showing that over 4.3 million people ( 32 % of all Australian employees ) are now working from home ( WFH ).
Some companies are considering scaling down physical offices in favor of a longterm remote working model . Employers are striving to balance team productivity , security and employee engagement . If WFH is the new norm , it ’ s impossible to ignore the challenging nature of the situation .
Remote working affects performance not only for technical , practical reasons . The emotional impact is perhaps equally significant . Business leaders may think the technology that allows us to do our jobs and the initiatives that enable us to feel supported at work aren ’ t related , but they ’ d be sorely mistaken .
This is why IT and HR teams need to partner to empower employees to do their best work from home and to help their organizations safely and securely weather the storm over the coming year .
Shared responsibility
Traditionally , IT Security teams have been considered the sole owners of the cybersecurity element of a business . It was their responsibility to implement the right technologies to protect the organization and that was that .
But in the current situation , the cybersecurity landscape is becoming increasingly complex with new and exacerbated threats : The surge in home working has caused a spike usage of vulnerable services , such as virtual private networks ( VPNs ), incrementing the likelihood of attacks to individuals and organizations .
Cybercriminals have been found to lure in people working from home with the pretext of sharing useful information on the pandemic and compromising their networks as a result .
These attacks can not only disrupt business activities but also cause employees a great deal of distress . With so many people accessing corporate networks from personal devices , their own data is also now at risk .
George Tsoukas , ANZ Manager , Gigamon
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REMOTE WORKING AFFECTS PERFORMANCE NOT ONLY FOR TECHNICAL , PRACTICAL REASONS .
While threat protection technology can help to safeguard organizations , users must also be trained to recognize potential threats in emails such as unsolicited attachments or links and be provided with clear guidelines on how to handle such events .
As part of the new landscape , companies should consider adopting a Zero Trust approach , assuming everything is suspect and eliminating implicit trust associated with the locality of user access .
This model is founded on network visibility and requires insight into all assets ( applications , devices , users ) and their interactions . This enables IT pros to create and enforce an authentication and access control policy : If these are tied to assets www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO
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