Remote Work and Data Security: The Human Factor

If you read our earlier blog, you know Egnyte commissioned a study to better understand how COVID-19 has impacted businesses’ ability to maintain data security and governance with a distributed workforce.

The results can be found in our inaugural Data Governance Trends Report. The report offers insights into tools that the 400 IT leaders implemented to help weather the abrupt change, but it also explains the human side of data protection and governance in the age of COVID.

The bottom line, not surprisingly, is that remote work increases the level of difficulty of proper data governance and security to prevent attacks like hacks, ransomware, and data carelessness. Only 29 percent of CIOs surveyed gave their employees an “A” grade for maintaining file security and ensuring proper data governance during COVID-induced remote work. From content sprawl in multi-cloud environments to unsecured WiFi to shared computers within a household, the new remote work reality has created a laundry list of new challenges for CIOs.

Those top-identified problems/challenges include:

• An estimated 37 percent of employees use unsecured networks to access company data,
• Employees using multiple repositories (multicloud) to share files,
• An estimated 28 percent of employees using personal devices to access company data,
• Employees having access to files they shouldn’t is a problem, and
• A lack of data-use policies in place for their company or policies in place are not enforced.

None of this is meant to demean or criticize any employees; some of these new challenges have been created in response to the ingenuity of workers to maintain productivity in the midst of chaos, while others speak to IT leaders not knowing what they didn’t know about managing a  suddenly remote workforce.

However, now armed with new experience and knowledge, successful CIOs have taken steps to mitigate the risks associated with the human side of data governance and information security. Many plan to invest in new technologies to help their workers with automated processes and AI to ease their burden and increase productivity while working remotely. These are tools built into Egnyte’s architecture. With behavior-based analytics, IT administrators can act before attacks wreak havoc on your organization’s critical content – taking the human factor largely out of the equation, allowing your employees to focus on their jobs and your business to move forward.