Home Office Safety and Security (HOSS) Week occurs in the second full week in January each year. During this week, Work From Home (WFH) employees are urged to evaluate the safety of their work environment in protecting themselves, their family and their employers. It is a nod to both the employee and employer taking time to ensure their policies are up to date and protection measures are in place.
In early 2022, the Pew Research Center reported that 60% of workers want to work from home most of the time. This is an increase of 6% since 2020. It is a very real business decision for employers to retain the right talent while assessing the risk of their new WFH teams.
For employees, this week is a reminder to do their part in their company’s total security posture. This includes shredding sensitive information and storing files securely. Take the time to understand your companies’ data retention policy in detail. Update all passwords and store them properly, not on sticky notes, but by using corporate preferred 3rd party applications or authentication applications provided to you. If you have personally invested in new office space equipment, ensure your insurance policy is up to date. Also keep all electrical appliances (desk, lamps, computers, docking stations, cameras, etc.) plugged in to appropriate power strips with surge protectors. Do your part to mitigate risk so you can continue the work life balance you crave and need to perform at your best.
For employers, it is another time to review policies, support and overall security to maintain your WFH teams. Ensure you have the technical staff and software in place to support your remote workers hardware and software fails. Having a distributed workforce team means more opportunity for breaches. Is the policy to allow employees to use their own devices (BYOD) and secure them remotely or provide company issued hardware? Do you need to invest is a password management software? Reevaluate your Virtual Private Network (VPN) connectivity or review an overall network re-design? Is it time to remove big infrastructure and focus more on cloud resources, your remote workforce can easily access for collaboration? Are you hearing a lot about Zero Trust and / or SDWAN solutions and want to understand if they make sense for you? There are a significant number of questions to ask as the WFH workforce becomes the new normal to retain the greatest talent.
IQ Wired assisted hundreds of organizations move swiftly in 2020 to a temporary secure, educated remote work force and now hundreds more in the permanent creation of a secure and reliable WFH environment. Our approach includes assisting to roadmap your organizations’ specific goals and initiatives. Changing the WFH landscape includes dialogue and decisions around your Governance, Risk, Compliance (GRC) approach, security posture, cloud initiatives, virtual instances and so much more. Let us be your trusted partner in building out the right solution(s) for your organization, IT teams and support your employees.