archTIS and subsidiary Nucleus Cyber have announced the publication of the 2021 State of Remote Work Security report that was produced in collaboration with Cybersecurity Insiders. Survey results gathered from 289 security leaders and practitioners found that while 90 percent of organizations are likely to continue supporting a remote workforce, more than three-quarters of respondents (79 percent) reported they had concerns about potential security risks being introduced by an increasingly distributed workforce.
The rapid shift to a remote-first working environment has not only fundamentally changed the way security teams are prioritizing how they should protect their network and data, it’s also greatly expanded the potential attack surface for external threat actors while making it easier for employees, contractors and guests with access to company data to either intentionally or accidentally expose sensitive data and files. The broad adoption of cloud-based applications and collaboration tools, the erosion of the traditional network perimeter, and the lack of visibility into user activity has further compounded the challenge of ensuring a secure remote workforce.
Some of the other key findings from the 2021 State of Remote Work Security report include:
- Almost half of those surveyed (46 percent) considered sensitive data leaving the perimeter as one of the top challenges of managing a remote workforce.
- Collaboration applications are a top security concern including file sharing (68 percent), video conferencing (45 percent), and messaging (35 percent).
- More than 60 percent of respondents believed that users mixing personal and corporate devices has degraded their security protocols.
- Seventy percent of organizations believed that this larger pool of remote workers will hinder their ability to meet compliance regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA.
- To better meet the challenge of protecting their remote workforce more than a third (34 percent) of organizations plan to prioritize human-centric visibility technologies, followed by next-generation anti-virus and endpoint detection and response (23 percent), improved network analysis and next-gen firewalls (22 percent), and Zero Trust Network Access (19 percent).
