Microsoft Finds 80% of Organizations Encounter an Increase in Security Threats Due to Remote Workers

Learning from last year’s shift to a remote workforce can help dictate how operations should evolve. New data from Microsoft points at the need to better secure remote workers.

Microsoft’s New Future of Work Report (subtitled Research from Microsoft into the Pandemic’s Impact on Work Practices) offers insight into how businesses have changed the way they work, what challenges exist, and what they’re doing to thrive. One of the topics within this pretty extensive 65-page report is a section on IT and Security where security professionals including SOC Analysts, security admins and CISOs were polled to understand how remote working has impacted the state of organizational security. Within this section are some pretty eye-opening stats:

• 80% of organizations surveyed stated they encountered some degree of increase in the amount of security threats encountered since the switch to remote working
• 62% said phishing campaigns were the most increased security threat
• Use and need for new collaboration tools were reported as the biggest threat to a company's compliance posture by 45% of organizations
• 28% of the polled compliance IT professionals reported that an increase in the number of devices employees were using to access company data was the biggest threat

One of the biggest issues IT faced, according to the report, was the lack of “end-user security education”, seen as the largest single long term impacting issue by 37% of organizations.

I’m obviously a huge advocate for Security Awareness Training, so it’s good to see organizations waking up to the material impact the lack of it can have on an organizations security posture – both short- and long-term.

If you have a material portion of your remote workforce, putting new school Security Awareness Training in place may be the needed next step to help close the security gaps that exist because of the shift to working remotely.