It is fair to say no one predicted 2020 playing out the way it has. Change has been enforced across all walks of our daily lives, and no more so than in the office, or the home office as has been adopted for most of us.

Organisations with more traditional outlooks on the working environment or their IT infrastructure and setup were forced to wholeheartedly adapt or risk failure in the wake of government-imposed lockdowns, restricting the workforce from leaving the house.

Businesses were forced to adopt new practices and technologies to make this happen, how can employees still provide output if the place of work is against the law to visit? What we experienced was an unparalleled adoption of remote working practices and huge acceptance and purchases of SaaS and Cloud technologies.

With these rapid adoptions and changes to working practices it’s easy to forgo data security and privacy which is traditionally at the forefront of a new IT project or migration to new technology. IT leaders were forced to forgo the usual procurement procedures and regulatory due diligence as uncategorised data and services moved equally as fast as the virus itself. 

In January of 2020 organisations had a handful of offices with hundreds if not thousands of employees.  Today, and potentially well past the end of the pandemic, for each employee there is a new office location to secure, and the traditional “office” model simply will not scale. What these changes mean more than anything, is that the proliferation of data to new services, people’s homes and new potentially unmanaged devices is happening more than ever before. Many different vendors will tell you they will save this problem for you, and many of them will help, but as usual in cyber security there is no silver bullet.

Data Classification tools are surely then more valuable than ever? Particularly in a fractured world of home working and diluted data management controls. If IT Administrative staff can provide protection on creation of data regardless of where it is being authored or stored then protecting it through Standard office suites, G-Suite, O365, DropBox et al becomes an altogether easier prospect.

This provides a multitude of challenges, but no more pressing than meeting compliance and regulatory requirements. This year we have seen US states imposing their own legislation, such as CCPA and we have seen Privacy SHIELD struck down sending organisations into a frenzy, but there’s also LGPD looming in Brazil and Thailand’s PDPA. All following on from the European GDPR which celebrated its second birthday this year.

To find out more about how HANDD can help with time-saving and reliability-enhancing dimension to your Data Classification solutions, contact the team of specialists at HANDD on 0845 643 4063.