Securing the Future III, The Evolution of Cybersecurity in a Pandemic, Amarach report for Microsoft Ireland

2020 will no doubt be remembered as the year when the workplace fundamentally changed. It may also be the year that traditional cybersecurity evolved. We are at a pivotal moment, as more employees work from home on a potentially permanent basis. Ireland has a unique opportunity to fully embrace the use of cloud services to support our post-COVID-19 economic recovery and enable more secure practices that support those working from home.

To explore the new working and digital security landscape in Ireland, Microsoft surveyed 500 employees and 200 business decision makers at a critical stage in Ireland’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The research updates previous studies in 2018 and 2019, but with an additional focus on the security impact of Covid-19 work-related practices now and in future. 

Last year, we identified a lack of confidence amongst Irish companies regarding their approach to digital security and access management. We found a gap existed between the organisations’ view of how secure they felt they were, versus the reality - where employee behaviour was leaving them open to data loss or hacking. We saw that iterative security policies and poorly implemented planning had spawned some bad employee habits that created potential vulnerabilities.  

In 2020, we see that these poor habits not only persist, but are compounded by the acceleration to remote working. If this poor behaviour goes unchanged, it will further undermine any confidence employees and organisations have in remote working and leave them open to losing data either by accident or by cyber hacker design. What is also alarming is that some organisations are potentially side stepping their own security procedures in the name of expediency.

Download the report now and discover how Irish companies have embraced remote working but have also exposed themselves to key security vulnerabilities.