Research shows two-thirds of organizations have experienced breaches caused by remote working

Work from home is here to stay. While it's unclear whether the adoption of remote working and hybrid working would continue after the COVID-19 pandemic, new research reveals that decentralized working is expected to remain in place for the foreseeable future.

New Fortinet Global Work From Anywhere Study released today surveyed 570 companies and found that 60% are still accepting employees working from home, while 55% are adopting a work-from-home strategy hybrid.

However, the growing adoption of work from anywhere has introduced new security risks that organizations are struggling to control. For example, Fortinet research shows that 62% of companies have experienced a data breach that they could at least partially attribute to vulnerabilities in employees working from anywhere in the past 2-3 years.

The high rate of breaches shows that remote work has not only introduced theoretical risks, but exposures that are actively exploited by threat actors to gain access to sensitive information.

Organizations have cited the lack of cybersecurity training for hybrid workers as a top concern in work-anywhere environments, as well as how best to extend enterprise security to home offices and to remote sites.

The challenge of securing decentralized work environments is amplified by the fact that organizations have limited visibility into users' home environments, branch offices, and offsite locations. This makes ownership of assets unclear, and it can be difficult to enforce zero-trust access controls and deploy patches to devices.

While the report found that most companies have not mitigated the risks associated with remote working, it did show that CISOs and security managers are investing in new technologies to increase their cyber resilience .

Specifically, respondents cited network access control, anti-virus solutions, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and cloud security solutions such as Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) as the most important tools for securing work environments anywhere in the future. .

VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital marketplace for technical decision makers to learn about transformative enterprise technologies and transact business. Discover our Briefings.