Half of employees fail to ensure safe data practices when working from home, according to the American email security firm Tessian.
Half of employees fail to ensure safe data practices when working from home, according to the American email security firm Tessian.
Its State of Data Loss Prevention 2020 report suggests that the sudden global shift to remote working poses new security challenges and that existing security procedures may be failing to curb the problems of insider threat or accidental data loss.
Although 91 per cent of IT heads trust staff to follow security practices when working remotely, more than half of employees (52 per cent) believed they could ‘get away with riskier behaviour’ when working from home. Eighty-four percent of IT leaders also say data loss prevention is more challenging when employees are working from home and 58 per cent of employees think information is less secure when working remotely.
Tessian’s report further suggests some key differences between US and UK workers’ attitudes. US employees are more than twice as likely as their UK counterparts to send emails to the wrong person (72 per cent vs. 31 per cent); that US employees are twice as likely to send company data to their personal email accounts than their UK counterparts (82 per cent vs. 35 per cent), and that a third (34 per cent) of employees take company documents with them when they leave a job, with US. workers twice as likely as UK workers to do so (45 per cent vs. 23 per cent).
“Businesses have adapted quickly to the abrupt shift to remote working,” said Tessian CEO Tim Sadler. “The challenge they now face is protecting data from risky employee behaviors as working from home becomes the norm.“
“Human error is the biggest threat to companies’ data security, and IT teams lack true visibility of the threat. Business leaders need to address security cultures and adopt advanced solutions to prevent employees from making the costly mistakes that result in data breaches and non-compliance. It’s critical these solutions do not impede employees’ productivity though. We’ve shown that people will find workarounds if security gets in the way of them doing their jobs, so data loss prevention needs to be flexible if it’s going to be effective.”