No longer a question of if employees should be able to work from home in flexible conditions, but rather quickly becoming a mandatory practice. Fortune 1000 companies around the globe are entirely revamping their office spaces to accommodate the fact that employees are already mobile, with studies repeatedly showing that desks are vacant 50-60% of the time. Twitter has also just announced that it is now mandatory for all of its 4900 global employees to stay home, while the story at Google is similar as they advise all employees in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa to work from home due to the virus.

The economics of remote work make it clear that it is not just a great choice for health reasons but also for the bottom line. Studies show that businesses would save an average of $11,000 per half-time telecommuter per year if employees were permitted to work from home.

The always on nature of mobile devices means that data is constantly leaking. Personal and corporate data is being mined even while we sleep. This includes exact location information, name and address and even usage patterns and available applications. This has massive implications for corporations entrusted with customer data as well as corporate trade secrets and other valuable information.

The inherent mobility of today’s workforce and the number of new remote workers emerging in the wake of Coronavirus is making it increasingly difficult for companies to keep track of what’s happening on every device in the network. With a significant proportion of network transactions taking place in the background without consent, it is important that organizations are closely monitoring this activity. Preventing the transmission of sensitive data to unidentified servers in regions where high levels of cyberattacks originate is paramount to protecting all network infrastructure.