TALKING

Some companies are considering scaling down physical offices in favor of a long-term remote working model . Employers are striving to balance team productivity , security and employee engagement . If WFH is the new norm , it ’ s impossible to ignore the challenging nature of the situation .

Remote working affects performance not only for technical , practical reasons . The emotional impact is perhaps equally significant . Business leaders may think the technology that allows us to do our jobs and the initiatives that enable us to feel supported at work aren ’ t related , but they ’ d be sorely mistaken .

This is why IT and HR teams need to partner to empower employees to do their best work from home and to help their organizations safely and securely weather the storm over the coming year .

Shared responsibility

unsolicited attachments or links and be provided with clear guidelines on how to handle such events .

As part of the new landscape , companies should consider adopting a Zero Trust approach , assuming everything is suspect and eliminating implicit trust associated with the locality of user access .

George Tsoukas , ANZ Manager , Gigamon

Traditionally , IT Security teams have been considered the sole owners of the cybersecurity element of a business . It was their responsibility to implement the right technologies to protect the organization and that was that .

This model is founded on network visibility and requires insight into all assets ( applications , devices , users ) and their interactions . This enables IT pros to create and enforce an authentication and access control policy :

But in the current situation , the cybersecurity landscape is becoming increasingly complex with new and exacerbated threats : The surge in home working has caused a spike usage of vulnerable services , such as virtual private networks ( VPNs ), incrementing the likelihood of attacks to individuals and organizations .

Traditionally , IT Security teams have been considered the sole owners of the cybersecurity element of a business .

Cybercriminals have been found to lure in people working from home with the pretext of sharing useful information on the pandemic and compromising their networks as a result .

If these are tied to assets and not network segments , the same set of policies can be applied regardless of where a user is accessing data and applications from .

These attacks can not only disrupt business activities but also cause employees a great deal of distress . With so many people accessing corporate networks from personal devices , their own data is also now at risk .

While threat protection technology can help to safeguard organizations , users must also be trained to recognize potential threats in emails such as

The thing about Zero Trust is that it ’ s not a product , it ’ s a mindset . While it ’ s IT ’ s job to get the technical elements right , people ’ s behavior , their awareness of security threats and their respect for policies , can have a huge impact . That ’ s why IT and HR teams must be in sync , with HR taking the lead in communicating the importance of a Zero Trust approach to the entire workforce .

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