A study conducted by Asavie into the challenges presented by COVID-19 to businesses has found that cyberattacks are the leading concern.
While an increase in home working has opened up new opportunities and productivity benefits, it’s also added new security challenges. Hackers are taking advantage of security gaps.
30 percent of the businesses in the study declared that enabling remote work and secure VPNs was a challenge. Many employees have become their own IT departments—sourcing their own equipment, and installing their own software.
“The evidence from Asavie’s global study shows the urgent need for the digital business to deploy frictionless security and access to applications and data to create the best possible user experience for employees and customers,” says Ralph Shaw, CEO at Asavie.
Most businesses have implemented WAN technologies through telecoms providers such as dedicated private networks, MPLS, and some SD-WAN.
However, when it comes to remote access, telcos have been unable to position themselves as viable for secure access. Just 28 percent of businesses in North America, 5 percent in the EMEA, and 3 percent in the APAC regions have looked to telcos for remote access.
“The fact that only 28% of enterprises in North America source remote access services from telecom operators presents an immense market opportunity for our mobile network operator partners,” continues Shaw.
Media & Telecoms (62%) is the top industry sector reporting cybersecurity attacks, followed by Financial Services (60%) and Health & Life Sciences (50%).
“The future of work will mean supporting remote workers, at temporary or home offices, ad-hoc points of sales, or employees on the go,” comments Amit Gupta, CEO at Ecosystm. “This means that organisations must secure devices, irrespective of where people work from and irrespective of the network they use.”
“CIOs and CISOs are coming to terms with the reality of increasing mobile workloads on remote devices and realise that private enterprise networks must be seamlessly extended to incorporate mobile and IoT endpoints from a single user to large teams.”
Asavie’s full report can be downloaded here (sign up required)
(Photo by Ricardo Arce on Unsplash)
