Adopting a Zero-Trust Approach to Stay Cyber Safe

According to a recent study by tech platform Growmotely, 74% of professionals expect remote work to become standard. Only 3% of the professionals and entrepreneurs surveyed said they want to return to working full-time at a physical office after the pandemic. While the increased flexibility is a big bonus for many people, unfortunately, cybercriminals are making the most of the increase in digitisation. It’s, therefore, more important than ever for companies to ensure security is a top priority. We’re recommending a zero-trust approach online.

The zero-trust approach centres on the idea that organisations should not automatically trust anything inside or outside their perimeters. Instead, they should verify anything and everything trying to connect to their systems before granting access or engaging.

With the rise of remote work and cloud collaboration tools, we’ve seen – from Microsoft Teams to Zoom, Office 365 and productivity platforms like Slack or Trello – people are spending more time online than ever before. Traditional, onsite cybersecurity solutions no longer cut it. Companies need to implement rock-solid identity and access controls and policies and to instil a zero-trust approach. Beyond engaging cybersecurity professionals to ensure data is secure in the cloud, organisations need to train their people at every level of the organisation to avoid unwitting data compromises.

Cyber-attacks are on the rise, including sinister and “under the radar” forms like business email compromise, and yet the majority of companies have not put in place training on cybersecurity and new ways of working. People can’t be expected to avoid the latest cyber scams if they haven’t been trained to spot them.

It’s also important to protect client or customer data. Security needs to be embedded in your business – not tacked on as an afterthought.

At Numata, we firmly believe that cybersecurity should be an enabler of digital transformation. We also know that business owners are busy running their organisations and it can be hard to give cybersecurity the focus it needs, and to work at entrenching a zero-trust culture in their people, which takes time.

We’ve recently launched our own cybersecurity division precisely to help businesses who need ongoing, specialist cybersecurity support from experts, at an affordable monthly rate. Find out more here.