Intelligent CIO APAC Issue 03 | Page 45

RISKING DATA SECURITY IS A DANGEROUS GAME WHICH PUTS CORPORATE REPUTATION AND EVEN LONG- TERM VIABILITY ON THE LINE IN THE EVENT OF A BREACH . with 70 % stating they were either only moderately prepared or not prepared at all .
workforce seemed far-fetched for the majority of organizations . Indeed , almost four out of five of those questioned said less than a quarter of their workforce was working remotely prior to the pandemic . Fast forward a few months and over 75 % of the same organizations ’ workforces are working from home indefinitely . Such a vast shift to remote working is unlikely to be seamless without the necessary planning and infrastructure in place .
Unfortunately , this often takes months , or even years to complete , far longer than the days / weeks that organizations had to adjust . Not surprisingly , only 29 % of respondents claim they were fully prepared for remote working when the pandemic hit , with 33 % saying they were either ill prepared or not prepared at all .
When considered from a security perspective , the picture becomes even more concerning ,

RISKING DATA SECURITY IS A DANGEROUS GAME WHICH PUTS CORPORATE REPUTATION AND EVEN LONG- TERM VIABILITY ON THE LINE IN THE EVENT OF A BREACH . with 70 % stating they were either only moderately prepared or not prepared at all .

Unmanaged cloud access poses a major threat to data security . To help ease the transition to remote working , more than half of organizations ( 54 %) have understandably accelerated their migration of user workflows to cloud-based applications .
Consequently , this has helped employees to access everything they need to do their jobs from home . However , with no managed device program in place , almost two-thirds ( 65 %) have allowed employees to access these cloud applications from personal , unmanaged devices . Alarmingly , that is despite 55 % of respondents acknowledging that such an approach poses a significant data security risk .
These findings indicate that organizations understand the risks but are operating
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