What does the pandemic and data loss have in common?
The global health crisis of 2020 has affected nearly every aspect of our lives, and the workplace is no exception. The Great Resignation – also known as the Great Reshuffle – has seen employees quitting their jobs and moving to new positions at unprecedented rates. In fact, in 2021, over 47 million Americans left their place of employment voluntarily. Not only was this a new record, but the trend is continuing strong in 2022. The phenomenon is considered a result of the rapid shift two and a half years ago when nearly 100% of American employees began working from remote offices overnight. Although it was chaotic and caused a lot of issues, the situation proved many things to both corporations, and their employees – most notably that remote and flex-time employment could be productive and cost-effective in many cases.
However, the work-from-anywhere workplace and the simultaneous adoption of cloud services combined create a new challenge for organizations attempting to protect their most sensitive data. Even if employees are let go and their termination was involuntary, the problem remains – large-scale employee turnover can result in data loss.
Top 2022 CISO Challenges
According to the current Voice of the CISO report conducted by ProofPoint, insider threats rose from the number three spot in 2021 to number one in 2022. With the magnitude of insider threats increasing by 40% in 2022, it’s easy to understand why insider threats and data loss are keeping CISOs up at night.
In addition, 50% of CISOs believe that protecting data is more difficult due to the Great Resignation. As personnel switch companies at increasingly high rates, it is essential to establish controls to protect your most valuable information from data loss.
Understanding a user’s motivation for data loss is needed in order to gain context and deliver the best response. While some departing employees may have malicious intent in taking company data, others may inadvertently take the information on a personal laptop or USB.
When malicious users steal data, the events are often publicized due to the possibility of adverse financial and brand impact. In 2021, both Pfizer and Qualcomm experienced a long-term employee’s theft of hundreds of files with confidential and propriety information. In both cases, the employee took the data with the belief that it would be useful in their next job.
How to Prevent Data Loss from Departing Employees
Employees who work with sensitive customer information and intellectual property often believe the fruits of their hard work belong to them. How can you protect your organization from any theft of this data? Proofpoint provides software and cloud-based tools to address this very issue.
- Monitor departing employees: Build watch lists of departing employees and begin monitoring their data activity on managed endpoints.
- Identify and prevent malicious users: Capture screenshots for forensics evidence and set up alerts for out-of-policy behavior, allowing security analysts can react in real-time.
- Flag and remediate careless behavior: Identify when users share sensitive files in the cloud (In DropBox, for instance) or with unknown recipients.
- Check out departing employees: Correlate abnormal or risky cloud data activity in the recent past and export PDFs and reports of the concerning activities.
- Prevent data loss across channels: Gather telemetry from endpoints, email, cloud, and web to gain a holistic view of incidents and avoid time-consuming investigations.
Most companies do not currently have these tools available to them, but managed services companies are beginning to bring them online. If your organization is looking to bolster security and protect data as the exodus of employees continues, call Alliance IT today for more information.
