Trend Micro’s Head in the Clouds study surveyed more than 13,000 remote workers across 27 countries to find out more about the habits of distributed workforces during the pandemic. The main results are:
- 39% of workers use personal devices to access corporate data.
- More than one third (36%) of remote workers surveyed do not have basic password protection on all personal devices.
- More than half (52%) of global remote workers have IoT devices connected to their home network.
- 10% using lesser-known brands
As the world sorts itself out during and post-pandemic, one thing is certain – remote working is here to stay. Fortunately, technology can provide the visibility needed to secure operational access, whether employees are working from the office or at home. While this level of flexibility hasn’t been so readily embraced in the past, secure remote access (SRA) is now being widely used to help companies survive and thrive. SRA is now being widely used to help companies survive and thrive.
Visibility into remote devices, connections, and activity monitoring is key, however, as companies don’t have control over the home office infrastructure. For example, we’ve heard of a plant engineer who is considered high risk due to a medical condition and needs to self-isolate. The company they work for has to provide secure remote access, so they can get “inside” their facility to manage their critical assets. The challenge is that by enabling remote access to critical operations assets, the company significantly expanded its attack surface.
A big spike in the number of people working from home, and most likely continue to do so, has brought about a change in the micro view of how employees operate and in the macro perspective of how the industry could operate in the future. The pandemic has forced an industry that’s slow to change even the smallest of details into accepting supporting technology.
Security was always thought of as a collection of people, processes, and technology, but the latter is now playing a bigger role in allowing businesses to operate via remote access. While it might be preferable for employees to be physically present, secure remote access technology allows organizations to manage remote access to critical systems in a responsible, secure way, providing situational awareness and auditability to see who is touching the business infrastructure.