More and more companies are re-evaluating what work will look like now that we are on the other side of the Coronavirus pandemic. Large tech companies were among the first to broaden remote working realities when it became apparent last year that the healthcare crisis would persist. Now – many of these same companies are announcing new work flexibilities that are intended to be permanent. They are moving to hybrid workforces.
Salesforce, headquartered in San Francisco with 61 offices across 28 countries and 49,000 employees, recently announced more than 65 percent of its workforce will come into the office only one to three days per week, up from 40 percent pre-pandemic. Moreover, additional employees will be fully remote.
Generally, other big brands have announced similar remote work from home choices, including Facebook, and Twitter. Indeed, it’s inevitable we’ll see many more companies adopting this model. Furthermore, the implications on their business will be shared in the weeks and months ahead.
Work from anywhere policies may be a dream come true. Especially, for many employees who seek greater flexibility, less commuting, and more professional opportunity without having to uproot families. However, it can be a daunting task to support, manage, and secure the work being done both within and outside of the corporate network.
Therefore, if you’re one of those companies turning to a hybrid workforce, how will the financial implications of such a decision be managed? How will HR keep employees connected and engaged? How will IT monitor and manage remote work devices, ensure corporate data security, and retool their own processes so they too can work from home?
In this post on adapting to a hybrid workforce, we take a look at IT asset management and data security needs. Therefore, here are 3 imperatives for implementing a successful, efficient, and secure work from anywhere strategy.
1. Connectivity
Undoubtedly, to see and manage the endpoints scattered among the homes of your employees, you first need a persistent connection to each. Thus, Absolute provides an undeletable tether to devices through a privileged position of being factory-embedded within the BIOS-level of the firmware of more than 500 million endpoints. We are in partnership with more than 25 top device manufacturers. Markedly including Dell, Lenovo, HP, and others.
2. Visibility
A connection to each device will allow you visibility into the device. Moreover, it allows visibility into the installed and web applications as well as data that reside on them. Significantly, this is critical because you cannot secure what you cannot see. Hence being particularly important as employees split time working from both home and office, outside the network firewall and back within it depending upon the day. This brings company data home and back again. Therefore, knowing where your data is, which applications protect it, and whether or not they are in fact working as intended is necessary to keep your information safe.
3. Control & Endpoint Resilience
Cybercriminal activity is as old as technology itself. The tactics they use to steal data vary widely and morph constantly. Likewise, security agents designed to guard against such attacks come in many different forms, from antivirus to VPN. However, these agents —all agents— regularly collide, decay, and fall out of compliance, as our 2020 State of Endpoint Resilience Report shows. Moreover, threat actors are also known to turn security controls off for greater freedoms within your environment. Accordingly, you need an automated, self-healing way to repair these tools. Correspondingly, without requiring them to be physically present, in a timely way to adequately protect data.
Prioritising connectivity, visibility, and control is what we call an Endpoint Resilience strategy. It’s essential to supporting and hardening the security controls and productivity tools used in a hybrid workforce. Particularly, it allows organisations to keep data, devices, and applications secure. With Absolute Resilience™, you gain asset accountability, auditable device management for compliance, self-healing security, and even rich data analytics. Consequently, this can further your enterprise evolution for whatever comes next.
To learn 5 steps you can take today for a smarter remote workforce tomorrow, download our guide Securing and Enabling Your Remote Workforce. To learn more about how organisations rely on the Absolute Endpoint Resilience Platform, take a look at our customer success stories.
By Torsten George, Cybersecurity Evangelist at Absolute.
Watch our webinar here to avoid 5 common security mistakes when Remote Working in Office 365.
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