The rush to support remote workers during the ongoing pandemic caught most organizations off guard. Now the remote workforce is the new normal.

Going forward, many businesses expect to support a bigger remote workforce into the future. As a result, companies are rethinking security and weighing the balance between employee convenience and securing the corporate jewels.

The new “2020 Duo Trusted Access Report: Ensuring Secure Access Amid a Major Shift to Remote Work” examines how companies are supporting remote work and what makes a solid and secure remote strategy.

Duo Security’s Dave Lewis

“As the pandemic began, the priority for many organizations was keeping the lights on and accepting risk in order to accomplish this end,” said Dave Lewis, global advisory CISO at Duo Security at Cisco. “Attention has now turned toward lessening risk by implementing a more mature and modern security approach that accounts for a traditional corporate perimeter that has been completely upended.”

The research, conducted by Duo’s data science team, analyzed data from more than 26 million devices, more than 500,000 unique applications and about 700 million monthly authentications. This spanned the vendor’s customer base in North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific. The team look at users and who has permission to access that user’s information; which devices are used to access applications; and which applications users are accessing.

Top Trends

Here are the top 10 trends.

Dealing with the New Normal

“When we look back at the massive global shift to a remote workforce, it comes into sharp focus that this will be a way the workforce will be doing business for years to come. The need to dispense with old security thinking is apparent. Zero trust, multifactor authentication, biometrics and passwordless are components of the path to a new bliss. It is of paramount importance to address the security of the workload in data centers and in the cloud as well. We are resilient, and security can act as an enabler for the way forward,” said Lewis.

In October, Cisco published two global research studies that looked at the challenges and opportunities related to the transition to a secure and productive remote workforce. The two reports are the Future of Secure Remote Work Report and the second annual Cisco 2020 Consumer Privacy Survey.