Secure work
from virtually
anywhere with
Verizon Remote
Work Solutions

While some companies have insisted on returning their workers to the office full-time, many others have already made remote or hybrid work a permanent feature of their business. And it’s no mystery why.

Ask workers about the benefits of remote work, and they’ll give you a list 10 feet long. Aside from the option of cuddling with pets during the day—without the expensive commute and rigid hours— workers generally feel happier and more productive working from home. Companies offering remote work also have access to a larger talent pool when it comes to hiring and have an easier time retaining valuable employees. 

Still, remote work poses a significant challenge regarding a key aspect of doing business virtually: cybersecurity.

After the sudden shift to remote work necessitated by the pandemic, 79% of respondents in Verizon 2022 Mobile Security Index agreed that they saw an adverse effect on their organization’s cybersecurity, with two-thirds of CISOs stating that their organizations were more vulnerable to cyberattacks. The benefits of remote work are numerous, but if companies want to maintain their reputations and protect their assets, they can’t ignore the potential risks related to employees working remotely.

What makes remote work a bigger risk than being in the office when it comes to cybersecurity? It essentially comes down to these three main challenges:

• The threats are expanding. Cyberattacks like ransomware continue to trend upward as cybercriminals constantly upgrade their tools and innovate new tactics. Additionally, many at-home employees lack business-grade networks or the technical knowledge to secure their home connections, work-issued devices and even their potentially risky IoT and smart devices.
• The workforce is still human. It’s a fact of life—and business—that people make mistakes. According to the Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, human error is involved in 82% of breaches. Lost devices, stolen passwords, phishing scams and misconfigured devices are just a few ways hackers gain access to company data and servers, then sell the data or hold it for ransom. Fortunately, companies and their employees can take steps to bolster at-home security, many of which are explained in the Verizon 2022 Mobile Security Index. Still, the ingenuity of hackers—and the limited technical savvy of many employees—means that workers can only bear so much of the responsibility for safeguarding their company’s information and infrastructure.
• Visibility can suffer. When workers use their at-home connections or personal devices to conduct work, security teams typically have less visibility into and control of those devices. This can limit the security team’s ability to protect them from potential threats. Standardizing the technologies used by remote workers can greatly improve security visibility and reduce IT support complexity.

Thankfully, business leaders are starting to realize that cybersecurity is no longer solely an IT concern. According to a recent survey, eighty-eight percent of Boards of Directors now see cybersecurity as a business risk—which is no surprise given the financial, reputational and operational damage just one breach can cause. 

In an effort to improve remote worker security, many companies implement security controls that inadvertently have a negative impact on productivity. Deploying security point solution after point solution might mitigate some risks, but those benefits are outweighed if it takes 15 extra minutes for every remote employee to connect to the corporate network, and employees are continually challenged to reauthenticate. If companies want to empower their employees to work from anywhere without compromise, ease-of-doing-business and security must find a balancing point.

The key to remote cybersecurity success, then, is layered protection and consistent support, built on a foundation that starts with dedicated wireless business internet. For example, as part of its Remote Work Solutions, wireless business internet from Verizon provides at-home users with a dedicated connection that includes data encryption and network-level authentication. Standardizing company-issued routers for remote work also greatly simplifies the burden on IT and security teams, who traditionally had to troubleshoot issues with an incredibly broad range of personally-managed routers. Remote Work Solutions from Verizon help build out solutions that fit customers’ unique requirements—whether the organization is managing a massive remote workforce or implementing a hybrid schedule. Additional security services include Wandera, a zero-trust cloud security platform that provides real-time threat defense and content filtering for remote employees’ endpoint devices, and Secure Cloud Gateway, which acts as a line of layered threat defense for distributed organizations and helps defend remote employees from malware. 

Further, as your company’s connected device footprint grows, so does its exposure to risk of SIM card misuse. Verizon can help security teams stay one step ahead of hijackers with Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) Secure, a security feature that proactively locks down the SIM cards in company-issued devices, allowing devices that you trust to connect to your network.

Plus, Verizon’s global backbone network provides private and public connectivity in >185+ countries and territories, offering unrivaled visibility into emerging cyber threats, which helps companies adapt quickly to new cybercriminal tactics.