Considering growing cybersecurity threats and business continuity risks such as infrastructural outages and physical crime, a sustained shift towards hybrid work demands that large organisations look at business security and resilience challenges holistically. The complexity of getting this right threatens to overwhelm time- and budget-strapped IT departments. 

That’s according to Chris Kruger, MD, at Nashua Kopano, a total workplace solutions provider that focuses on enterprises and government clients. He says that while some companies have called some teams and employees back to the office for the entire working week, hybrid and flexible work has become the standard operating model for many roles and organisations. 

Says Kruger: “Over the past few years, we have seen a shift towards more decentralised working models, with mobile connectivity enabling people to carry out processes and transact from nearly anywhere. 

“But many organisations are still grappling with the complexity of ensuring security, resilience and continuity when some work gets done outside the corporate firewall and the campus. IT functions need to gear themselves up for a world of anywhere operations,” says Kruger.

Cybersecurity remains high on the agenda 

Kruger says cybersecurity is the issue that has drawn the most attention. With employees working on unsecured home and public networks, companies have less control over network security. Furthermore, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) models mean that many people work from personal devices rather than secured, company-issued PCs and smart devices. 

Employees working from home may also be more susceptible to social engineering scams. The result is that most companies face a larger threat matrix, which is also evolving by the day as cybercriminals dream up new zero-day ransomware and social phishing attacks. 

The 2023 WFA Global study found that two-thirds of companies in South Africa have reported data breaches due to work-from-anywhere vulnerabilities.

“This highlights the importance of embracing an augmented defence and a unified management approach for endpoint security, says Kruger. Companies should seek out cybersecurity solutions that are simple to deploy, easy to manage, and able to safeguard digital assets from a range of potentially harmful and costly attacks, without compromising end-user experience. 

“But traditional cybersecurity isn’t the only area that companies should focus on. Kruger says that the print and document management environment also merits attention. Digitalisation of paper should be a priority to enable secure, centralised storage of documents in compliance with laws such as the Protection of Personal Information Act.” 

“User permissions, multifactor authentication, and electronic storage are all best practices for flexible working. Data backups are another vital component of a secure, resilient hybrid workforce,” says Kruger. “Companies should be looking for solutions with advanced anti-ransomware technology to safeguard data and systems in any environment.” 

Addressing continuity challenges 

Kruger says beyond cybersecurity, large enterprises are evaluating other threats to business continuity. “With the load shedding crisis that South Africa currently faces, for example, there is a growing interest in alternative energy and power backup solutions that can help keep branches, offices and remote teams productive throughout power outages.” 

“In a landscape where companies face multiple business continuity risks, a well-planned and managed hybrid work model can improve their resilience. It enables them to reduce dependency on any single location and gives them the operational flexibility to adapt quickly to changing circumstances or unexpected events.”

“But to achieve these benefits, companies need access to workplace solutions that can be deployed nationwide yet managed from a central location. They want to work with a single partner that can help them tighten security and improve resilience, bringing together elements such as voice, energy, connectivity, cloud, document management, access control and surveillance in a single solution.

“With companies navigating risks from crime and unrest to water and power outages, ICT planning is not only about the adoption of digital tools and processes. It should also consider remote workforces, how teams work together, and having access to maintenance and support services,” Kruger concludes.