One of the biggest impacts COVID-19 had on businesses was how quickly millions of employees around the world had to adapt to strict work-from-home policies. Within a matter of a few weeks, having most staff off-site became the only way that many organisations could continue to function.
For businesses within the AEC industry, this presented a number of significant challenges in ensuring business continuity. Engineers, architects and other high-intensity users of technology needed to have the same user experience as if they were in the office, while still maintaining the safety and security of company data.
This security challenge was exacerbated by changed habits in the workforce. HP’s recent Blurred Lines and Blind Spots Report has discovered that changing work styles and behaviours are creating new vulnerabilities for companies, individuals and their data.
The report found that 77 per cent of Australian office workers reported that working from home during COVID-19 had blurred the lines between their personal and professional lives and 71 per cent of employees globally said they are accessing company data at home more frequently than they did pre-pandemic. On top of that, almost one third (30 per cent) of remote workers said they had let somebody else use their work device.
While these behaviours on their own might not ring alarm bells, when coupled with evidence of an incredible rise in the global cyberattack volume they present a real risk. The Federal Government’s Cyber Security Centre’s Annual Threat Report, July 2019 to June 2020 revealed there was a huge spike in cybersecurity incidents immediately following the pandemic. It found that April, May and June 2020 were three of the four worst months in the year, and that business email compromise had seen a significant increase.
Essentially, the realities of flexible work have increased the danger of security compromises in a time when an increasing number of nefarious actors are seeking vulnerabilities. Given this, it’s unsurprising that HP’s report found that almost all Australian IT decision-makers (92 per cent) consider endpoint security (securing the device) just as important as network security.
As many organisations start to return to offices on a semi-permanent basis, it’s clear a renewed focus must be put on ensuring company data is safe and secure while enabling flexible working for employees.
That being said, the security challenges for AEC organisations can be especially complex, because of the sophisticated applications and rich data in use. Solutions need to not only protect the organisation but also ensure that employees can stay productive without adding further complexity to their job function. One of the best ways to do that is embedding security into the hardware.
This is the goal of HP Wolf Security, a portfolio of hardware-enforced security and endpoint-focused security services. Z by HP Workstations are engineered to be resilient with features that can self-monitor and self-heal, ensuring that devices are secure and that sensitive data is locked down below, in, and above the operating system.
All Z by HP Workstations include a portfolio of security solutions, built into the hardware, that puts protection first. These include:
- HP Sure Click – Web browsers are a primary attack vector for malware and other threats. HP Sure Click is a hardware-enforced solution that isolates web content, ensuring that any malware clicked on cannot affect other tabs or applications on the device.
- HP Sure Start – This continually inspects the system BIOS and automatically self-heals should the BIOS be damaged by malware or corruption, restoring BIOS code from a protected backup.
- HP Sure Run – Should a device in your network be infected and compromised, this isolates the impacted device from the network, ensuring that other devices on the network aren’t impacted and business-critical work can continue.
- HP Sure View – The best security programs won’t stop somebody from viewing information on the screen. HP Sure View is an integrated privacy screen that makes data visible only to the user sitting in front of the device.
- HP Sure Sense – HP Sure Sense harnesses the power of deep learning AI to identify and quarantine never-before-seen attacks, helping to prevent infections before they happen.
As businesses adjust to a world where remote work is an expectation and a need, they must ensure their cybersecurity not only excels in hybrid work situations but that it does so while evolving to protect against increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals. HP Wolf Security provides comprehensive endpoint protection and resiliency that starts at the hardware level and extends across software and services.
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