Organizations are failing to adequately support secure remote working practices, according to new research from digital services provider Capita.
Despite the undoubted productivity benefits stemming from more flexible working practices, only half (52%) of the 2000 UK knowledge workers Capita surveyed said BYOD was an option for them. Even fewer, just 14%, said they were encouraged to use their own device.
The vast majority of employees (92%) said they believe it’s the organization’s job to secure remote working, yet over two-fifths (42%) claimed current security policies make it difficult to do their job.
Capita IT & Networks’ head of workspace and collaboration, Ian Hart, told Infosecurity that there continues to be a conflict between user expectations and the reality of what employers provide for remote working.
“While the technology to meet these cultural working expectations is available and has been used to deliver flexible services to consumers for a number of years, a lot of organizations are still struggling to modernize their own internal IT services,” he argued.
“For many, partial adoption of cloud services while maintaining existing older IT platforms has created more problems for both end users and those managing the service.”
By failing to completely modernize their IT systems and give staff access to their preferred technologies, enterprises aren’t able to become user centric, Hart explained.
“Naturally, CIOs cannot allow unfettered access to corporate systems, but they also must ensure they are not acting as a blocker to employees’ productivity,” he added.
“By providing employees with a single robust user identity, organizations can protect all the services that sit behind it and remove the reliance on a specific trusted device or connection to access corporate services. In addition, by replacing traditional desktops and applications with a more user-centric and modern IT environment, organizations can have better control over the sensitive material they need to protect, while, allowing employees to work more flexibly and safely from any location.”