Cybersecurity

The near-overnight shift to remote work models created a perfect storm of security challenges. Employees were suddenly working outside the secure perimeter, and IT teams were focused on providing connectivity to corporate applications and data. Even organizations that already had a distributed workforce had to quickly scale up their remote access infrastructure.

Email remains a primary vector for cybersecurity threats. According to the Verizon Data Breach Incident Report, 94 percent of malware is spread via email, and phishing accounts for 80 percent of social engineering attacks. Losses associated with phishing attacks averaged $17,700 per minute in 2019, according to data from RiskIQ.

The rapid shift to work-from-home models has largely been successful, enabling public- and private-sector organizations to keep functioning and meet social distancing requirements. The benefits have been so great that many organizations plan to offer remote work options after the pandemic has abated. A Cisco survey conducted between June and September 2020 found that 37 percent of organizations expect to continue work-from-home arrangements long-term.

Despite the digitization of many business processes, workers still need to print, scan, fax and copy documents. However, employees working from home no longer have access to the business machines in the office. This has led to a surge in demand for home office printers and multifunction devices (MFDs).