Remote Work Privacy and Cybersecurity Essentials

With the onset of Coronavirus, the issue of remote working has been pushed to the forefront for organizations globally.

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.

Perhaps the biggest concern facing remote workers is the level of data exfiltration (data loss or data leakage) happening on their devices.

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.