Challenge One: Not all Employees will return to work 

There is little doubt that we are seeing the emergence of a very different workplace. More people are going to continue to work remotely, whether full-time or part-time, and businesses are going to have to deal with the impact of the predicted recession. 

This new environment brings with it many challenges, not least for company cyber security plans. 

If businesses are to properly secure their critical assets and develop their security strategy, they will need to properly understand their newly expanded workplace. 

 

“We work with a lot of personal data. Our rapid move to homeworking left us feeling exposed on IT security. But Blue Saffron provided helpful pragmatic advice and helped put in place additional safeguards  for our most sensitive data” – midlands based mid sized professional services firm

Challenge two: an increase in cyber threats and scams 

Online threats have risen by as much as six times their usual levels over the last five months. Whilst the mainstream media has perhaps been prone to an over exaggeration of the impact of remote working and potential security lapses, what is unequivocal is that the security “attack surface” – the things that hackers can attack – has altered significantly.  

This is Real and not imagined. To provide some idea of scale, scale, Action Fraud  recorded  over 32k reports of cyber crimes in last 13 months, the national cyber security centre have removed over 300,00 links to investment and celebrity scams, and the govenment reported that almost half of business (46%) have had a security breach or attack in the last 12 months.  

Challenge three: a potential recession 

The UK has now officially entered recession which will place pressure on operating budgets and might mean that businesses are tempted to reduce their spend. This could come in the form of job cuts, delayed projects, or cuts in technology and services.

Although Cyber security has seen healthy growth in spend in recent years, this should be no grounds for complacency. Establishing more efficient ways of working should always be front and centre. One of the best ways that companies can do this is by taking advantage of technology that automates time-sapping processes and determining how well their current solutions integrate with each other. 

Surviving the economic outlook will depend, in part, on making the best use of data. Within the security realm, this means having a good comprehension and understanding of risk to prevent attacks – but it doesn’t necessarily mean that costly investments will need to be made. Businesses should look at their existing tech stacks, identify inefficiencies and establish ways to get the solutions to work more collaboratively. 

 

“Blue Saffron helped to get us compliant with GDPR regulations and in turn made sure all our staff knew what to do to keep our data safe.  

Challenge four: cloud security accelerating digital transformation 

Although Covid-19 has put many transformation projects on hold, cloud adoption and substitution continues to increase at pace. It isn’t just investment in cloud services that’s increasing – interest in technologies like networking, VPNs, firewalls, identiy management  and a host of others,  are helping to accelerating digital transformation.     

With significant increases in recent IT support activity, it is important that those responsible for security have the capacity, resources and agility needed to support the businesses as it spins up new services and undertakes new initiatives. Setup and configuration should be both repeatable and executed well to prevent any new risk being introduced to the corporate environment.  If there are any chinks in the armour, they risk falling into non-compliance. At a time when fiscal stability is paramount, the threat of attack and the risk of landing fines from regulatory bodies cannot be underestimated. 

 

“Blue Saffron’s flexible assistance has been invaluable in helping deliver a major overhaul to our IT systems ” – bespoke online travel agency

 

“Our in house team were stretched to capacity during the first quarter of this year – without fuss, on time and on budget. Blue Saffron delivered a  substantial upgrade to our remote security defences” – South East England based recruiter

Challenge five: Remote Working – Reassess and Rework  

For many businesses, one of the challenges of deploying remote working at pace was the oversight of security technologies. Concern over this was borne out by our independent research:  

• a full 88% suggesting that addressing security was one of the top priorities.  
• 65% of enterprises believing their security risks had increased.  
• 74% reported that their customers were more concerned about cybersecurity and data protection. 

To better protect themselves, businesses should develop a cyber security model that accommodates working from home on an ongoing basis.  

To secure their remote workforce, organisations must define how to handle employees with hardware or software issues, know how to maintain management of remote computers (including patching, configuration and detecting any potential compromises or policy violations), and should have a plan of action that can be used if internal IT systems become overwhelmed. 

End-point security (broadly end-user devices like desktops, laptops, and mobile devices) should figure highly in activity, and even basic anti-virus protection will often include artificial intelligence to block advanced viruses, malware, exploits, and ransomware attacks.  

One of the most requested tasks during the early phases of the pandemic was the auditing of home-based working environments and optimising the configuration for more appropriate equipment without compromising security.

More on the Blue Saffron  product set here.