Most people have become accustomed to working from home in recent months. After the initial rapid transition to home working at the start of the pandemic and the battle to enable secure connections to applications and data in the multi-cloud and data center, IT teams have since been able to adapt technology and processes to the new situation and requirements of an external workforce.
With vaccination levels rising worldwide, many hope to return to the office and the world return to “normal”. However, companies would do well to opt for an approach that promotes, rather than hinders, their digitization plans and takes the related security risks into account. This writes James Tucker, Sales Engineering Director Benelux and Nordics at Zscaler.
Back to the office
Tucker: “It’s understandable that after such a long period of restrictions, many employees would like to go back to the office to see colleagues face-to-face. However, this impulse can make people less cautious than before and thus lead to more risks – not only concerning the virus but also in terms of cyber threats.
Throughout the era of remote working, IT security professionals have battled malware that not only attempted to compromise the end-user device but also infiltrated the infrastructure. Many laptops are now located outside the corporate environment and thus beyond the direct control of IT teams. Bringing these devices back to a corporate network will undoubtedly lead to increased security incidents. Some malware is specifically designed to lie dormant until the host device returns to the corporate network. Proper planning, and ideally a complete zero trust strategy, is critical to minimizing this risk.”
Companies should not make the mistake of interpreting the return to the office as a return to normalcy, ignoring what has happened since the staff left the office. You can read how you can prevent this error in the full article by Zscaler on managersonline.nl.