Elly Yates-Roberts |
The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically, and immediately, changed how and where people work. This change is no longer temporary and it is simply a fact that for most organisations, the new world of work is one where employees can, and do, work from multiple locations, such as traditional offices, home, or even while they are travelling the world.
This shift to hybrid work as a norm has created additional information security requirements for organisations. The ‘castle and moat’ approach to security implemented in traditional offices is no longer applicable now that people have shifted to remote and hybrid work.
Security continues to be the biggest concern that we have heard from customers across every industry. With employees transitioning seamlessly between business and personal activities on their home computers and networks, the home network and all devices accessing it have effectively become part of the corporate information security real estate.
Our customers are taking an aggressive approach to secure their information technology landscape. All devices that access corporate resources must be managed. Using Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Azure Active Directory, our customers are implementing a combination of device management and conditional access to ensure that the devices they use to access their data are both authorised and compliant with current security policies.
Many of our customers are now adopting a passwordless authentication strategy to further strengthen their security positions. The main goal of this approach is to eliminate passwords as an authentication mechanism, which removes their value for attackers. Passwordless authentication provides more robust security against attacks, reduces IT support costs and enables remote workers to move seamlessly between devices. Using tools like Windows Hello and the Microsoft Authenticator app, employees can provide authentication without remembering and changing a myriad of passwords.
As the world continues to embrace hybrid work, all companies should be focused on enabling their workers to easily transition back and forth between remote and in-office work in the most secure manner possible. Now is the time for all organisations to ensure that the tools and technologies are in place to allow employees to work securely from anywhere.
Rohana Meade is president and CEO of Synergy Technical
This article was originally published in the Spring 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.