British Organisations Are Unready For Remote Work

Every industry has been affected in some way since the emergence of Coronavirus. It has changed the way in which we all work and created new opportunities for cyber criminals to target remote workers. Working from home has become  a gateway for such criminals to carry out alternative forms of data theft. 

Now, research reveals that half of UK businesses lack the most basic cyber security skills, prompting urgent calls for employers to take action. 

The research has found that UK businesses are ill-equipped to deal with cyber attacks, despite 60 per cent experiencing one in the last 12 months. The majority of surveyed UK organisations are relying on employee education rather than wider strategy changes to meet the challenges of modern remote work scenarios. 

According to research by ManageEngine, 67 percent of organisations raised employee awareness around security threats and 66 percent provided training on cyber security. According to ManageEngine’s Digital Readiness Survey, which polled more than 300 IT professionals in the UK, employees don’t appear to be fully engaged with these best-practice initiatives and less than half (47 percent) of organisations have adapted their organisational security strategy.  

Another study, carried out by ThycoticCentrify, found that 79% of respondents have engaged in one least one risky activity over the past year. More than a third (35%) have saved passwords in their browser in the last year, a similar number (32%) have used one password to access multiple sites, and around one in four (23%) have connected a personal device to the corporate network.

Most organisations have neither introduced new solutions nor configured their existing architecture to reflect the changing ecosystem, despite the obvious dangers of dealing with a remote workforce. 

• Only 42 percent monitor employee devices to ensure their security. 

• 76 percent of IT purchases are being made without direct approval from IT teams, creating a disconnect between them and other departments and opening the organisation up to security vulnerabilities from unpatched software. 

• 95 percent of companies are planning to continue supporting remote workers for at least the next two years, determining how to adapt and enforce security strategies is critical given the rise in security threats. 

• 45 percent of organisations have experienced an increase in phishing, followed by increases in account hijacking (38%), social media-based attacks (36 percent) and endpoint network attacks (34 percent).

Key to tackling these emerging threats upfront is placing a renewed focus on the role of the IT leadership in the organisation, according to Chris Windley, Chairman and CEO of the Cyber Security Association. “The level in which IT is embedded within the wider organisation still varies depending on the business. This disconnect, in terms of level of authority and lack of sufficient operating budget, is leading IT professionals to become ‘yes/no people’ as opposed to informed consultants to other teams... There needs to be a more collaborative approach in terms of how the IT team works with the business as a whole, and how it enables access to the right tools and software to ensure cyber and data security, and integrity.”

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