IT security moves into focus

A recent survey by Avast shows that fears about security among IT decision-makers in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have increased by 56% since the start of the pandemic. The more employees a company has, the more worries and concerns IT managers currently have. According to the survey, 35% of companies with two to five employees are concerned about the home office situation since the pandemic, while the figure is up to 70% for companies with 100 to 300 employees. 

Working from home raises concerns

The new work model, i.e. the significant increase in employees regularly working from home since the pandemic, is a major source of concern for IT managers. Among other things, this change in the world of work has resulted in an expansion of company networks and securing them has become a strategic priority for many companies. Of the IT decision-makers surveyed in the study, 59% stated that they are struggling to keep up with securing their employees' devices when working from home. At the same time, 54% of respondents said that it is difficult to educate employees about cyber risks and how to avoid them when they are working from home. 

Before the pandemic, 20 percent of German SME employees and 30 percent of IT decision-makers worked from home. Unsurprisingly, these figures have risen over the past year, with SME employees more than twice as likely to have worked from home in the past twelve months (44%) than before the pandemic.

Regional differences

What is striking is that the extent of working from home is not uniform across all countries, even if the pandemic is influencing decisions. For example, working from home was more prevalent in the UK than in Germany last year - 64% of employees in small and medium-sized enterprises worked from home in the UK last year, compared to just 44% in Germany. For IT staff, who are often responsible for on-site tasks, these figures were lower with 57% in the UK compared to 36% in Germany.

Despite the challenges and increasing concern among IT managers, SME employees have words of praise for their colleagues in the IT department: 77% said their company did a good job of safeguarding remote workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition, 66 percent of employees said that their company had learned valuable lessons for dealing with remote workers as a result of the pandemic.