The weight of the constraint, some will defend themselves.

IN TERMS OF SECURITY, CRISIS OR NOT, IT IS LAXITY. THE MOST ELEMENTARY MEASURES HAVE OFTEN BEEN DELIBERATELY BYPASSED.

Laxity will have a cost in terms of risk. 48% of organisations admitted to compromising security or increasing security risks by being lax on security policies and giving employees more leeway than was normally acceptable. It’s huge.

If barely 20% of companies recognize that remote access security measures are knowingly bypassed, how many still ignore it? We notice today that standardisation is not a return to the past, Palo Alto analyses in its study The State of Hybrid Workforce Security 2021 (panel: 3,000 people involved in security).

A crisis … which extends over time

As corporate life resumes, teleworking is taking hold step by step, we now have to deal with this new hybrid way of working with dispersed teams. What was to be a crisis situation has spread over time. And has spread to all business activities. 60% of companies extended the use of BYOD during this time!

To allow remote access to company data, security managers have swapped their hat of ‘mister no’ for the role of the one who issues the keys for remote access: laptops, certificates of authentication. But all of these openings have opened up more opportunities to attackers and thus likely contributed to the unprecedented increase in the success of ransomware attacks.

Security measures disabled

35% of respondents agreed that their employees had bypassed or deliberately disabled the remote security measures they implemented!

The consequences are heavy. 53% of organizations that favoured remote access are now exposed to significant security risks from uncontrolled acceptable use policy violations and unauthorized use of applications.