By Libby Bagley, Community Manager at License Dashboard

When most business leaders began planning for lockdown and a shift to remote working, the potential challenges they were preparing for centred around the operational difficulties of being able to collaborate from a distance. There may have been changes to processes and policies, staff training on new tools, as well as plans on overcoming financial obstacles as a result of the pandemic.

However, there was less consideration for the impact of remote working on cybersecurity. For all the benefits of allowing staff to work from home, both in terms of productivity and work/life balance, it inevitably leaves a business more open to security threats.

The average office setup is very different to the home environment of most employees, with relaxed admin rights of the latter allowing staff to easily and quickly download free trials of products that might pose a danger. Having teams working remotely also means you won’t all be on the same centralised system for updating anti-virus software.

On top of this, as the move to the cloud increases – especially when we consider the reliance on tools like Microsoft 365 – the very nature of having employees accessing files and software from multiple locations, networks and devices, is a risk to corporate information such as financial stats or customer data.