Mobile working data breach worries

As remote working continues to grow in popularity, adding massive flexibility for organisations, mobile working data breach worries are not being properly addressed.

According to a recent study, almost all (95pc) of businesses still struggle to secure mobile working, leaving both employees and the organisation on the whole at risk of mobile working data breaches. The study also said that one-third of businesses have suffered a data breach or a data loss as a result of mobile working, with one-in-five suggesting that mobile workers themselves simply don’t care about security. This is particularly shocking.

The information gleaned from this study is hugely concerning.

Mobile working data breach risks continue to grow

Mobile working data breach risks continue to grow as more employees are able to work remotely, whether from home or on-site with clients. Mobile working with remote desktop connections, virtual private networks and access to servers and emails is essentially another doorway hackers can exploit and use to get into the organisation’s wider systems and network.

The more access points there are, the greater the risk is for the organisation.

Will GDPR make a difference to addressing the issue of mobile working data breach worries?

You would think that the new GDPR that came into force at the end of May would be enough of a motivator for organisations to take the steps they need to address the issue of mobile data breach worries. With the new powers afforded to regulators allowing fines to run up to £17m, few businesses can simply afford to pay the fine if they are responsible for a data breach.

That being said, naivety and data protection often go hand-in-hand these days. Despite the fact that we live in an increasingly digital world where more and more of our business is online, and with remote working also growing in popularity, organisations are still not doing enough to safeguard against data breaches.

The recent Ticketmaster data breach is a clear testament to how little regard is paid to issues of cybersecurity. A totally preventable breach that stemmed from the use of coding on the payment platform that wasn’t secure.

Mobile data must be secured

Data that’s mobile must be properly secured. We cannot have scenarios like the recent police data breach involving sensitive criminal data getting lost in transit between two offices, but at the same time, utilising systems for accessible mobile data to avoid the need to literally move hard data from one place to another means organisations must ensure their networks and systems are fully secure.

The issue of mobile working data breach scenarios will not go away when we live in a time where remote working and mobile working continues to grow, but data protection is left behind.

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