A 9-country, global study by Zogby Analytics and Infoblox revealed that half a year into the pandemic, companies are still playing catch up to optimize their remote work experience. The study noted that 90% of business leaders have put cloud as a priority this year. Respondents are also bracing themselves for more cybersecurity attacks.
George Chang, vice president of sales for the Asia-Pacific and Japan region at Infoblox, noted that when the COVID-19 pandemic first began, organizations in APAC rushed to enable remote work overnight.
"Their top priority was making sure that workers could connect to enterprise applications from their homes—sometimes through unsecured personal devices," he added.
Key findings include:
The borderless enterprise is here to stay. More than 90% of decision-makers consider digital transformation and cloud-managed services a priority. Globally, the percentage of companies with a majority of employees working remotely more than tripled from 21% before the shutdown to 70% after. 40% of companies plan to make remote working a permanent policy after COVID-19.
Organizations are still building out their IT infrastructure and security controls to optimize remote work. Within APAC, Australian (52%) businesses were “very prepared” for the transition, while Japan (38%) and China (38%) reported lower but still high levels of perceived preparedness. Overall, organizations say distributing sanctioned devices (35%), building network infrastructure (35%), and securing the network (29%) were top IT challenges when transitioning to remote work.
Threat mitigation and network visibility remain the top security concerns for the remote work environment. Globally, 68% say better threat detection and or mitigation technologies would enable more remote work for their organizations. Respondents are looking for better visibility into devices on the corporate network (65%), cloud applications workers are using (61%), and compromised devices (46%).
China (80%) and Australia (79%) respondents considered better threat detection to be particularly helpful, while better visibility into devices that are compromised is relatively more valued in Japan (62%) than in other countries.
Security incidents are rising. Half of the surveyed businesses worldwide are seeing more cyber-attacks—with the biggest jumps in China and Australia—while just a quarter are seeing fewer.
Companies are reversing policies to allow the use of personal applications to foster collaboration. 73% of companies in Australia and 66% in Japan are allowing workers to connect with each other using applications like WhatsApp, Zoom, and Houseparty, compared to 63% globally.
Companies are using cloud security tools to secure the borderless enterprise. Among respondents to the study, companies in Australia (73%), China (65%) and Japan (72%) plan on making additional investments in DNS to secure their expanded networks.
Chang observed that while most organizations can now accommodate the basics of remote work, this report highlights the need for more security controls.
The survey revealed that to meet that need, many of the surveyed companies are turning to DNS to rapidly stand up a foundational layer of security for employees working from home.
“Using a hybrid DNS security solution enterprises can create a ubiquitous layer of visibility and security across their expanded infrastructure," he opined.
