10 Months into COVID-19, Businesses Still Playing Catch-Up with Endpoint Security in Hybrid Work Environments

• New survey shows IT teams were not fully prepared for the sudden transition to remote work
• 10 months in, secure access and endpoint security remain a top challenge in enabling hybrid work environments
• 66% of IT pros believe the COVID-19 situation will spur increased cybersecurity investments

Endpoints remain challenging to protect in a remote environment, according to more than half of IT professionals in a new global survey by Cisco. And 66% say COVID-19 is driving an increase in cybersecurity investments, to overcome these hurdles.

For most of 2020, almost every industry on the globe has been marked by COVID-19, one way or another. Businesses everywhere scrambled to transition to a remote work environment almost overnight, forcing IT administrators to live up to an unexpected challenge – at an unprecedented scale and speed.

New research by Cisco shows IT teams were not fully prepared for the sudden transition to remote work. 10 months into the pandemic, secure access and endpoint security remain a top challenge in enabling hybrid work environments going forward.

The networking giant’s Future of Secure Remote Work Report shows that most organizations around the world were at best only somewhat prepared to support a remote workforce. Key findings:

• Secure access is the top cybersecurity challenge faced by the largest proportion of organizations (62%) when supporting remote workers
• One in two respondents said endpoints, including corporate laptops (56%) and personal devices (54%), are a challenge to protect in a remote environment
• 66% of respondents indicated that the COVID-19 situation will prompt an increase in cybersecurity investments

While Cisco’s study is relatively new, the findings are not exactly ‘news.’ Bitdefender’s 10-in-10 survey from May showed that 50% of IT professionals had no contingency plan for a situation like COVID-19, while 86% had already seen a rise in targeted cyber-attacks at the start of the pandemic. 81% also posited that the novel coronavirus would definitely change the way their business operates in the long term.

As more organizations adopt the work-from-anywhere model, Bitdefender is tackling remote-work security with a holistic approach – an integrated endpoint protection, risk management and attack forensics platform, enhanced with user behavior risk analytics.

Businesses can leverage Bitdefender GravityZone with integrated risk management and analytics to continuously assess, prioritize and address misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, including human-triggered ones. Learn more here.