More than half of all employees say that their jobs rely on collaboration with other workers. You need to ensure that your employees have access to easy-to-use collaboration tools and that those tools are secure against data breach and other forms of cyberattack.
Why Secure Collaboration is Important
Few employees today are permanently located in offices down the hall from one another. Teams in your organization are likely to include employees located in a number of diverse locations, with many working from their homes.
Despite not being physically connected, these teammates still need to collaborate with one another just as if they were sitting around a conference table in your office. In order to collaborate successfully, these employees need:
- Access to shared data files
- Access to one another
- Access to others inside and outside your organization
Because these workers share confidential information when collaborating, everything they share – files and communications – must be secure against unauthorized use or attack. Maintaining strong security is challenging enough when all your employees are located under the same roof and becomes more so when employees are dispersed across the country and around the world.
Remote Collaboration Increases Security Risks
One of the results of the COVID-19 crisis was an immediate and unplanned expansion of the remote workforce. Employees working from home still need to share files and collaborate with one another – even though 16% of remote workers say they have difficulties with collaboration and communication when working from home.
Remote workers also represent a significantly increased security risk to your organization. Cyber threats of all types have increased significantly over the past several years. For example, during the first year of the COVID pandemic HP Wolf Security found that the volume of cyberattacks increased by 238%. A related survey of IT decision makers revealed that:
- 56% saw a rise in malware infections via web browser
- 54% saw a rise in phishing attacks
- 44% saw users’ personal devices being used to breach company data
Why did malicious activity increase so much during COVID? It all has to do with rapid growth of the remote workforce and the risks associated with that.
Use of Personal Devices
When employees work from home they’re more likely to use their own personal devices for work. This includes personal computers, mobile phones, and tablets. These personal devices are unlikely to be as secure as devices issued by your IT department.
In addition, many home workers employ their work-issued devices for personal use. Some even let other family members use their work devices, which increases the risk of visiting sites with malicious code. Employees using work-issued devices at home are susceptible to phishing schemes and other social engineering attacks targeting their personal email accounts.
Both work-issued and personal devices used outside the office environment are also at increased risk of theft. A stolen device containing sensitive work data could put your entire organization at risk.
Use of Unsecured Wireless Networks
Most home networks and public Wi-Fi hotspots are considerably less secure than your corporate network. Remote workers connecting to the office via these unsecure networks are more susceptible to attack and communication interception.
Use of Insecure Collaboration Tools
Unfortunately, many of the tools that employees – especially remote workers – use to collaborate are inherently insecure. These common tools include:
- Email, which is used to deliver 75% of malware and other threats
- Text messaging
- Consumer video messaging platforms
- Phone calls over cellular networks
- Cloud-based file sharing services
Until you move your employees off these insecure platforms onto a secure collaboration platform, the risk of breach or attack remains high.
Lack of Education and Preparation
The average employee lacks sufficient security training. This is especially true of employees ordered to work remotely with little advanced notice. IT staff were equally unprepared for the sudden increase in remote workers and may not be able to adequately guard them from attack.
How a Secure Collaboration Solution Can Reduce Your Security Risks
To enable collaboration between employees while securing their data and communications from unauthorized use, you need to embrace a collaboration strategy that includes a secure collaboration solution, such as Wickr. The secure collaboration platform should include easy-to-use yet secure:
- Text messaging
- Audio calls
- Video meetings
- File sharing
A secure collaboration solution uses a variety of technologies and processes to ensure the security of all communications and file transfers. Chief among these technologies is end-to-end encryption that encrypts all data in transit, including text, audio, and video communications. End-to-end encryption ensures that even if communications are hijacked mid-stream, malicious actors cannot successfully access the information contained within.
Choose Wickr as Your Secure Collaboration Solution
When you want to ensure easy and secure collaboration for your employees, turn to Wickr. Our secure collaboration solution employs end-to-end encryption and other military-grade security to ensure that text, voice, and video communications and shared data files cannot be hijacked or breached. Reduce your enterprise’s security risks with Wickr, the foremost secure collaboration platform available today.
Contact us today to learn more about how Wickr can help secure collaboration in your organization!