The lockdown enforced in light of the Covid-19 pandemic has forced employees from across the industries to work from home. This not only includes employees working in large organisations, who have been given aid to work from home securely, but also the ones working in small companies. Now, a new report says that employees working in small organisations were not provided with appropriate tools to work from home amid the pandemic.
According to a report by cyber security firm Kaspersky, three in five employees of small organisations (roughly 57% employees) were not provided with corporate devices and security solutions from their employers, compared to an average of 45% of staff working in all companies.
Report further states that only one third of small business staff, which is roughly 34% employees, indicated they were given any IT security requirements, such as anti-malware solutions, WiFi routers, and regularly updating device operating systems in order to reduce risks from unpatched vulnerabilities, to work securely on personal devices.
Having such instructions in place has recently become even more necessary, given that 35% of small business employees admitted they have begun to store more valuable corporate information on their home devices, as well as in personal cloud storage services 25%, the report noted.
“Small companies may be in difficult circumstances and their first priority is to save their business and employees during the lockdown. So it is no surprise that cybersecurity may become an afterthought. However, implementing even basic IT security requirements can decrease the chances of malware infection, compromised payments or lost business data,” Andrey Dankevich, Senior Product Marketing Manager, B2B Product Marketing at Kaspersky said in a statement.
Apart from highlighting the issue and the risks, the cybersecurity firm, in its report, also talked about simple measures that companies can take to protect their data even as their employees continue to work from home. The list includes protecting home devices using an antivirus solution, updating devices operating systems and apps regularly, password protecting all devices including smartphones and Wi-Fi routers, using WPA2 encryption in Home Wi-Fi, using VPSs and using a security solution that enables device and server encryption and creates backups for all corporate data among others.
