"Ensure work devices are use for work purpose, to avoid cyber attacks"

Rohan Vaidya 
Regional Director of Sales, CyberArk (India)   

Preparedness to face challenges of data security: 
The pandemic has altered nearly every aspect of how organizations around the world operate. Everything from the rapid shift to remote work to completely rethinking the nature of customer interactions has contributed to turning the business world on its head. 

These changes have also caused a dramatic acceleration in digital initiatives across industries. Many drove what felt like five years of transformation in five months – as they quickly adopted technologies to help productivity and business continuity. Whether it was bringing on new collaboration tools or moving critical infrastructure and applications to the cloud, everything has become more distributed. 

The best practices adopted for remote working:
With many people Working From Home, cybersecurity has become an even hotter topic than before. With remote working, each one of us is now a potential entry point into the organisation for attackers, so risks have now increased, and organizations have become more vulnerable to cyberattacks than ever. 

Cybercriminals are playing on people’s fears around Covid-19 to conduct social-engineering based attacks. Whilst using new-age technologies and applications can be unusual for some, cybersecurity also becomes a major concern

By practising some simple tips and tricks one can mitigate the risks.

With so many of us working remotely from our homes, corporate security can easily be an afterthought to maintaining productivity. Some advice for a more secure environment:

Be productive and secure from anywhere, add biometric, multi-factor authentication when connecting to company systems and data.

Ensure, if possible, that work devices are used for work purposes only, to reduce exposure to dodgy websites and malware, that patches are kept up-to-date and are backed up to a secure location.

Role of CISOs: 
It has been an eye-opener for many organisations that working from home is indeed possible, does not negatively impact productivity, and can increase the wellbeing of staff.  But this model comes with a security caveat. CISOs have been thrust onto the front line of this shift because of the clear security risks that home working represents. They have become involved in the fundamental business of organisations worldwide, which has absolutely resulted in more senior interactions. Cyber is now part of the strategy, not something that needs to be solved after the strategy has been put in place.