In July 2019, ACS commissioned YouGov to conduct our first Agile Working survey, one question being – how often do you work from home? – 48% of the UK workforce said that they never worked from home, with only 22% working from home once a week or more.
The ONS survey in April 2020 showed an increase of 46.6% of the workforce now working from home, with 86% of those doing so due to COVID. As lockdown restrictions evolve many more people are returning to offices, but even then, a mix of home and office-based attendance is likely.
In March, businesses rapidly adopted more remote working solutions, issuing laptops and collaboration tools on mass. Understandably, less concerned about security than being able to continue to operate.
What this means is that right now we have workforces operating in new locations, potentially outside the easy reach of IT teams using unfamiliar systems that may not have been configured and selected as robustly they might otherwise have been.
When somebody is setting up a video conference call for a sensitive meeting, is that call being configured in a secure way? Are there steps in place to prevent unauthorised participants joining? What about the content shared and created in those calls? Where is it stored and who has access to it? How are we managing data? Have we granted home workers the option to bring their own device? How do we know that device is secure? Are people using personal email accounts for confidential business? Do they have multi-factor authentication on those accounts?
The threats are increasingly sophisticated, so business requires a sophisticated cyber resilience strategy. This isn’t just about preventing a breach but also having the capability to quickly recover should a breach occur.
“By 2022, 60% of large and global enterprises, and 90% of midsize enterprises (MSEs), will implement passwordless methods in more than 50% of use cases, which is an increase from fewer than 5% today.”
Security as a Service
The ACS security portfolio isn’t just a list of products that we provide under the banner of ‘security’, but a carefully curated roadmap that allows businesses to progressively improve their security stance in an integrated and thought-out way.
Our Security as a Service offering means that having a mature, highly sophisticated cyber-security strategy doesn’t require the mega-budgets of large enterprise organisations but can be delivered at an affordable per-user-per-month basis.
And when it comes to recovering from a disaster if the worst should happen, ACS in partnership with our sister company Datastore 365 have been building Disaster Recovery as a Service solutions for almost a decade.
For more information contact ACS Office Solutions on 01604 704000 or visit www.acs365.co.uk.
