In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when organizations rapidly shifted their employees to remote work, the focus was typically on maintaining business continuity first and foremost. Cybersecurity was important, too, but because cybersecurity teams assumed that widespread remote work would be a temporary affair, they didn’t always invest extensively in securing remote workforces.
Fast forward to the present, however, and it’s clear that challenges that once seemed temporary have become permanent. Like organizations across all sectors, government agencies are now committed to remote or hybrid work environments for the indefinite future. Indeed, in July 2021 -- before the full onset of the Delta variant of Covid-19 threw yet another wrench into return-to-office plans -- Gartner predicted that more than 80 percent of employees would work totally remotely or on a hybrid basis after employees returned to the office. The takeaway here is that, for agencies that haven’t yet implemented the security controls necessary to mitigate cybersecurity threats against distributed workforces, now is the time to do so. Remote work has become the new normal, and security for remote workforces must enter the same category. This article walks through four key points to bear in mind when securing the IT resources of remote and hybrid workers.
Point 1: Remote work means more risks
The most basic point to understand is that -- to put it bluntly -- the more remote workers you have, the more cybersecurity challenges you are likely to face. That’s due in large part to the fact that remote employees are more likely to intermix personal applications and data with those that they use for their work. When employees work from home, you can’t use on-premises firewalls to segment work resources from the Internet, for example. No ..
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