95% Employees Want to Continue Remote Working, but Poor Security Habits Make the Future Bleak

With no vaccine yet to counter the pandemic, employees still feel safe & comfortable working from the four walls of their home. Despite deeming safe to return to offices, employees feel they are more productive at home and are happy working remotely. But with poor security practices adopted by employees when working remotely, will the businesses reconsider the long-term viability of remote work?

A new remote workforce study from CyberArk (NASDAQ: CYBR) reveals that 95 percent of employees want to continue remote working, but nearly 67 percent ignore corporate security policies. This makes their company’s infrastructure and information vulnerable and more prone to cyberattacks and ransomware attacks.

What Employees Went through and How?
It wasn’t easy for the employees to work from home when pandemic forced them to do so. Employees had to deal with many new and had a tough time balancing their family and work within the same four walls. The pandemic forced us to live a virtual life in virtual environments and left us to make peace with them. Nearly 78 percent admitted to having technology issues with connecting to corporate systems and resources, which emerged as the biggest hurdle. 45 percent of remote employees surveyed cited disruption from family and pets as the biggest challenge of remote work, followed by balancing work and personal life (43 percent) and Zoom Fatigue (34 percent).
However, despite several challenges, employees also recognized the distinct benefits of remote work including saving time on commuting (32 percent), being able to run errands (24 percent) and catch up on household chores between meetings (23 percent).

Security, Productivity & Convenience – Tough Tasks to Master
Nearly 67 percent of surveyed professionals admitted to finding workarounds to corporate security policies in order to be more productive including sending work documents to personal email addresses, sharing passwords, and installing rogue applications. But poor security habits remain a big concern for both employees and companies. What it needs is educating the employees even after months of them working from home. Over 54 percent of the employees surveyed said that they had received remote-work specific security training.

However, 69 percent of respondents admit to using corporate devices for personal use, 57 percent admit that they allow other members of their household to use their corporate devices for activities like schoolwork, gaming and shopping – a 185 percent increase from a similar survey conducted earlier.

A common step to secure your device and information is to keep your password stronger and change it frequently. However, despite this basic, nearly 82 percent of the respondent admitted reusing passwords, a 12 percent increase from the last survey.

“The global pandemic has been the largest test yet for the future of distributed work. Working people have proven incredibly resilient as they rise to the challenge and overcome the stress and significant obstacles of blending home and work lives,” said Matt Cohen, Chief Operating Officer, CyberArk. “As we continue to adapt to this new way of operating, it’s the responsibility of both employees and organizations to take responsibility of corporate security. Organizations should continually reinforce best practices and implement user-friendly tools and policies while employees need to understand and be receptive to those policies.”