Don’t Assume Remote Employees Are Following the Rules

(Updated 7/26/2022)

National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is here, and in the era of remote working, there’s never been a better time to focus your energy on eliminating vulnerabilities and finding new ways to keep your data safe. You can’t always assume remote employees are following your cybersecurity rules.

For many organizations –– people, not technology, are at the root of most data breaches. To remedy that, IT teams have spent recent months producing new guidelines and advice for distributed workers and putting new support desks and hotlines in place to handle problems as they emerge.

Ultimately, though, there’s simply no way to eliminate human error. No matter how well we coach employees, not everyone will follow the organization’s cybersecurity rules. Stress, isolation, and understandable distractions such as health concerns or the pressures of tending to children during school closures can all make mistakes. 

Often, well-meaning employees then compound problems by ignoring them — or by improvising solutions, leading to additional headaches as security teams grapple with shadow IT and unauthorized hardware assets.

So what’s the solution? We must keep working to educate our employees. But we also need to accept that as long as our processes rely on human judgment, they’ll be vulnerable to human error. Only by automating our data-processing systems can we truly take control of data security.

Proofpoint has developed best-in-class AI-powered data discovery and information classification tools. Using artificial intelligence, we can eliminate the risks associated with misclassified data, and ensure that sensitive assets are automatically tagged and handled appropriately, even in distributed settings. And with advanced detection tools, we can ensure problematic data handling gets spotted and dealt with quickly, enabling your security team to deal with problems before they spiral into major breaches. 

People are under incredible pressure right now and mistakes will be made. But with the right tech stack, you can minimize your exposure to human error and help to keep your data safe even during these difficult times. Want to learn more? Get in touch to learn more about Proofpoint Information Protection, and find out what Proofpoint can do for you.

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