Safe working practices suffer when working remotely

Almost half of employees are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home according to a new report from email security firm Tessian.

While 91 percent of IT leaders trust their staff to follow best security practices when working remotely, over half of employees (52 percent) believe they can get away with riskier behavior when working from home.

Half (48 percent) cite 'not being watched by IT' as a reason for not following safe data practices, closely followed by 'being distracted' (47 percent). Additionally, staff report that security policies are a hindrance -- 51 percent say such policies impede their productivity and 54 percent will find workarounds if security policies stop them from doing their jobs.

"Businesses have adapted quickly to the abrupt shift to remote working. The challenge they now face is protecting data from risky employee behaviors as working from home becomes the norm," says Tim Sadler, CEO and co-founder of Tessian. "Human error is the biggest threat to companies' data security, and IT teams lack true visibility of the threat. Business leaders need to address security cultures and adopt advanced solutions to prevent employees from making the costly mistakes that result in data breaches and non-compliance. It's critical these solutions do not impede employees’ productivity though. We've shown that people will find workarounds if security gets in the way of them doing their jobs, so data loss prevention needs to be flexible if it’s going to be effective."

Among other findings of the report are that US employees are more than twice as likely as UK workers to send emails to the wrong person (72 percent vs. 31 percent). IT leaders in US organizations with over 1,000 employees estimate that 480 emails are sent to the wrong person every year. Yet, Tessian platform data reveals that employees send at least 800 misdirected emails per year -- 1.6x more than IT leaders estimate.

US employees are also twice as likely to send company data to their personal email accounts than their UK counterparts (82 percent vs. 35 percent). US IT leaders estimate that just 720 emails are sent to unauthorized accounts a year. The reality, according to Tessian, is at least 27,500 unauthorized emails are sent a year -- 38x more than IT leaders estimate.

Workers in the 18-30 age group are three times more likely to send emails to the wrong person -- 69 percent vs. 21 percent of workers who are 51 or older. And while 31-40 year-olds are more careful with email, over half (57 percent) admit to sending misdirected emails.

In addition 34 percent)of employees take company documents with them when they leave a job, with US workers twice as likely as UK workers to do so (45 percent vs. 23 percent).

You can read more in the full report available from the Tessian site.

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