One of the main business talking points this Autumn is the impact on office workers who are successfully working from home. I find this subject fascinating as having worked from home for many years, it does not really impact me, but interestingly some of my peers who have the daily commute to an office, work side by side in large office floors, socialising/lunches and face to face meetings have adjusted really well and embraced the working from home situation. Each person is different and some cannot wait to get back to the office – but a great many now like working from home and would definitely prefer this with only a visit to the office a couple of times a week.
I am not an economist by any stretch, but is this really going to be the right thing for our new working lives? If employers and employees implement this, there will be savings to be made: large office spaces – not required as people can desk hop, less traffic on public and private transport, better life/work balance, BYOD – Bring your Own Device – people tend to use their own technology so saving on hardware/software. Fantastic! Okay, consider the impact on the other side of the argument – less office spaces to be maintained – less employees in maintenance, so job losses, transport cuts as lower level of traffic, lunchtime trade – cafes/restaurants lose valuable daytime trade and for me, being in the cyber security marketplace, the risk of BYOD and home-working on the corporate network is a major issue.
Speaking with our clients and partners, this is certainly putting the pressure on the Cyber Security Teams, Human Resources and Data Centre Managers. There is a need to ramp up the security efforts at device level and to monitor end-users for unexpected changes in their working arrangements. We are all savvy nowadays and use anti-virus/malware monitoring software, VPNs on our home devices, but now the IT security teams need to know much more about our home networks – oh interesting times ahead!