How Forced Hybrid Work Created Vulnerable Businesses

A lot of mid-size businesses that had 3-5 IT team members pre-pandemic are finding that, in this new environment, they can no longer operate at their previous level. And that’s no surprise: the FBI recently reported that cyberattacks have increased by 400% compared to pre-pandemic times.

Many mid-size businesses used to be able to manage IT in-house when their whole staff was in-house, but as the complexity and sophistication of cyberattacks increase, that’s quickly becoming a thing of the past. Organizations having to quickly adjust to support a work-from-home environment created a feeding frenzy for bad actors.

The most significant change organizations have experienced since pre-pandemic is their data is now predominantly in the cloud, rather than all being inside a firewall-protected data center. While IT teams frantically worked to accommodate the new work-from-home set-up, they quickly found out that their traditional security products gave them zero visibility into suspicious activity in the cloud.

Cybercriminals have upped their game, and this means your IT team needs to up its game, too. Your old level of IT resourcing is no longer enough, and it’s more difficult than ever to maintain the required level of expertise because of how threats evolve and change month to month.

As more data moves to the cloud and the boundaries between work and home continue to blur, mid-size businesses now have more employees working from more locations and using more personal mobile devices.

While this shift is convenient for employees who prefer to work away from the office and access this data wherever they go, it also means you have more points of risk to think about. Mobile devices can be lost, and personal devices that may have minimal security installed — or worse, none at all.

You and your employees may think nothing of pulling out your phone or personal laptop to address work issues on the go but doing so effectively doubles the number of endpoints that attackers can target.

Employees who are off the clock still pose risk to your business data if they fall prey to a personal phishing scheme. If they’re also using personal devices for work, they may not think twice about opening a potentially fraudulent personal email while logged into work accounts.

Which brings us to…

 

As a results of the Great Resignation, recruiting and retaining IT talent just got significantly harder.

In an already competitive space this is no small challenge. If you want to learn more about this topic, we wrote an entire blog post on this subject: CLICK HERE.