As
social distancing measures become common and
workers adjust to their new professional environments, even from their
own living rooms, there is potential for private and working life to
blur into one. Kaspersky’s new How
COVID-19 changed the way people work report reveals how quarantine influences the way people work from home.
The
‘new normal’ that workers are now facing is starting to have an impact
on their work-life balance. Nearly a third (31%) of workers globally
said they
are spending more of their time working than they did before. However,
46% said they have increased the amount of time they spend on personal
activity. This particular change may have come about because workers are
now not having to commute or travel as much
than they were before.
The
report also revealed that it has become harder for workers to separate
working and personal activity, especially when it comes to IT. 55% of
workers say
they are reading more news now than they were before they started
working from home. While this is understandable because people will want
to stay updated with the latest Coronavirus developments, 60% of this
activity is done on devices that are used for work.
This can however potentially lead to malware infections if employees do
not pay attention to the resources and websites they visit.
Workers
are also developing a habit of using their personal services for
working purposes – increasing the potential risks from shadow IT,
including the disclosure
of sensitive information. For instance, 42% of employees use personal
email accounts for work-related matters, and 49% admit their usage has
increased when working from home. 38% use personal messengers that have
not been approved by their IT departments, with
60% of them do it more often in their new circumstances.
“Organisations
cannot just fulfill all user requests, such as allowing staff to use
any services as they want to. It is
necessary to find a balance between user convenience, business necessity
and security. To achieve this, a company should provide access to
services based on the principle of only supplying minimal, necessary
privileges, implement a VPN and use secure and approved
corporate systems. These types of software may have certain restrictions
that slightly reduce usability, but offer greater assurances in
providing security measures,” comments Andrey Evdokimov, Chief
Information Security Officer at Kaspersky.
To
ensure businesses do all they can to keep their employees and corporate
data safe, Kaspersky recommends employers follow these measures:
- Schedule
basic security awareness training for your employees. This can be done
online and cover essential practices, such as account and password
management,
email security, endpoint security. Kaspersky and Area9 Lyceum have
prepared a
free module to help staff work safely from home
- Ensure devices, software, applications and services are kept updated with the latest patches
- Install proven protection software, such as Kaspersky
Endpoint Security Cloud,
on all endpoints, including mobile devices, and switch on firewalls.
Any solution used should include protection from web threats and email
phishing
For workers and users at home who have to work from their personal devices, Kaspersky advises:
- Using a reliable security solution, such as Kaspersky
Security Cloud, for comprehensive protection from a wide range of threats.
- Only downloading educational and entertaining content strictly from trusted sources
For more information about the impact working from home has had on workers and to read the report in full, visit https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/report-covid-wfh/.
