Create a Security Culture for Your Remote and Onsite Workforce

From our perspective, the conversation within organizations around mobility empowers users, such as employees, guests and contractors, to enhance productivity. To ensure that the mobile environment is protected, security awareness is crucial. However, the problem with security awareness is that organizations often treat it as an annual event; meaning, they conduct training and seminars, deploy applications and manage devices, for example, for users. Instead, leaders should be transitioning from a security awareness mindset to a mobile security culture, particularly in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the shift from a primarily onsite to a remote workforce.

The decision-makers in charge of this will deal with more than just lost or stolen mobile devices. They'll need to define a process for handling mobile incidents while not impacting user productivity. 

To create this security culture, organizations should think about these three mobility-related matters.

3 Mobility-Related Matters to Think About:

1. Mobile Security

Data in an anytime/anywhere environment needs to be controlled. Now, it's even harder to protect your environment, for its boundaries aren't what they were. Instead, they're now your remote workforce's homes, leaving your control on shaky ground. Due to this shift, it's important to anticipate an increase in cyber attacks on your workers' home attack surfaces and plan and protect accordingly for the long-term. A return to how things were is, most likely, not the direction many businesses will take. IT leaders need to shift their approach to accommodate a potential new workplace model by re-evaluating and adjusting their entire IT structure.

2. Short and Long-Term Business Priorities

The business' goals need to be defined and communicated, and mobility should be part and parcel of reaching those goals. Consider each of your business' departments. What role does or can mobility play to make your business run more efficiently, securely and seamlessly. How can you use mobility to generate growth, improve internal communications and enhance the customer experience? If mobility hasn't been a significant factor in defining your business priorities, it probably is now in today's pandemic-centric life. If not, take steps to understand what you need to do to bring your organization current and competitive. Tap into your IT leaders, employees and customers' viewpoints to get started on moving to a mobility-focused workplace.

3. Users

With the onset of COVID-19, businesses pivoted almost overnight to a remote office environment, bringing a bundle of concerns, such as security vulnerabilities, disruptions to functionality and employees feeling disconnected from each other and shared business goals. Pandemic or not, companies should foster an open dialogue environment between management and users to increase productivity and enhance job satisfaction. Bringing people together through technology, such as implementing new, user-friendly applications, is one way to improve communications and workflow quickly. From a security perspective, how do you improve current procedures to include mobility or strengthen your existing mobile defenses? How do you make new security measures around mobility simple to incorporate, adopt and manage? User buy-in is vital; pay close attention to ensuring team members are confident they are working and collaborating effectively and with ease.

The mobile transition from security awareness to security culture far exceeds technology; its evolution relies on forward-thinking company leadership and user adoption. With the pace that technology is moving and the rapidly rising mobile-first IT environment, businesses should take steps to transition sooner than later.