Study highlights Saudi businesses exposed by risky remote employee behaviour

Tenable commissioned Forrester Consulting to undertake a research that highlighted the risks posed by employees working remotely. The information comes from ‘Beyond Boundaries: The Future of Cybersecurity in the New World of Work,’ a commissioned research of over 1,300 security leaders, business executives, and remote employees, included 104 Saudi Arabian respondents. When security leaders and business executives were asked how convinced they were that staff were taking necessary steps to protect the company’s data, 47 percent stated they were very or fully confident. Speaking with remote staff, on the other hand, revealed a different image.

“Employees want the flexibility to work from anywhere. The challenge is how they do that securely,“ explains David Cummins, VP of EMEA at Tenable.

He added,  “This study confirms what we already suspect — remote employees are connecting to sensitive corporate information from personal devices on insecure consumer-grade home networks, whether they should or not. Security teams need to accept this reality and change their perception of risk. They require visibility of their entire threat landscape, with the intelligence to predict which cyberthreats will have the greatest business impact on the organization. In tandem,  they need to implement adaptive user risk profiles in order to continuously monitor and verify every attempt to access corporate data with the ability to decline requests that fail to meet the rules set.”

When asked what was most essential to them, 85 percent of remote employees stated it was somewhat or extremely important to protect customer data. Remote employees, on the other hand, reported accessing this information using a personal device in 54% of cases. Protecting the company’s intellectual property is a similar problem, with 68 percent of remote employees saying it’s vital and 20 percent saying they’ll use a personal device to access it. In fact, only 47% of remote workers indicated they always take precautions to protect their company’s data, intellectual property, and infrastructure when working from home.

Only 11% of remote employees strictly obey their businesses’ regulations barring access to data and systems via personal devices, according to further investigation. Perhaps most concerning, 34% of employees indicated they will disregard or circumvent their company’s cybersecurity regulations, while 21% stated one of the issues they face is that their company’s security policies and practises are unclear.