Working from Home – Safe as Houses?
A recent article from Finder.com stated that across the UK more than 1.54 million people work from home, up from 884,000 just ten years ago. However, this has increased by a further 60% as the UK’s adult population work from home during the Coronavirus lockdown.
According to David at talkRISK, “We are currently working with a number of clients who are experiencing a loss of control of their organisation’s processes. This is due to a disparate work force, spread across multiple locations, and has led to a change in habits. Whereas someone might ask a colleague across the room for advice or guidance on policy, people are now taking independent decisions. Where consensus forms a policy, initiative often forgoes policy”
“We help these clients reassess their processes, their commercial contracts and their IT estate in line with GDPR. This also includes putting policies in place for employees not to download Apps or technology not sanctioned.”
It’s not just your home workers who are susceptible to viruses…..
But it’s not only unapproved business tools causing an issue for organisational security. Platforms used safely used prior to Covid, are proving challenging today. Zoom, for example, has been one of many remote platforms experiencing unprecedented increase in demand, but having suffered a number of breaches over the last few months, have been forced to improve their security protocols.
“Cloud in the Time of COVID”, published on April 6, 2020 states, “From a business perspective, cloud collaboration platform Zoom has increased from a typical 10 million users per day to an unprecedented 200 million, which has left it vulnerable to attack”.
Influencing and ensuring employee decisions while working remotely is critical. An organisation-wide policy for IT and how to manage the flow of personal data throughout the organisation has never been more essential.
A final say from talkRISK concludes,“ Assisting clients to manage the risk associated with processing personal data within a virtual office environment is the goal. Clients are keen to achieve GDPR certification to demonstrate to their value chain compliance with the act”.
Would you like to chat through your options and get your queries answered? Arrange a call with David using the calendar below and he will be delighted to connect with you.