As personal use of managed devices becomes ubiquitous, risks increase

2020-08-05 04:30

Based on anonymized data from millions of global users, the report found there was a 148% rise in remote workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic-which resulted in a 161% increase in visits to high-risk apps and websites, as personal use of managed devices nearly doubled.

"While many companies rose to the challenge to embrace cloud-based collaboration tools, we also found increased risk as employees used work devices for personal reasons. Organizations must tackle this problem head-on by prioritizing threat protection and ensuring safe cloud and web access through methods like strong authentication and access controls, data and threat protection, as well as zero-trust network access to private apps in data centers and public cloud services. Enacting measures like this will reduce exposure of apps, cloud-enabled threats, unintentional data movement, and limit network lateral movement."

Along with this increase in remote work came an 80% increase in the use of collaboration apps as remote workers seek to remain connected with their colleagues, and the total number of cloud apps being used in the average enterprise increased to over 7,000 in the largest enterprises.

Personal use of devices increased by 97% and use of risky apps and websites increased by 161%. As employees become more accustomed to remote work, the lines are blurred between business and personal use, as employees are much more likely to use their devices for personal reasons and engage in risky activities.

Notably, Netskope Threat Labs found that there is a 600% increase in the amount of traffic to websites hosting adult content, and that 7% of all users uploaded sensitive corporate data to personal instances of cloud apps-putting this data at risk of inappropriate use and theft.

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