Almost 40% of businesses have sacked staff due to a breach of company cybersecurity policy since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak

LONDON ― August 18, 2020 ― 39% of UK business decision-makers have admitted to dismissing staff members due to a breach of company cybersecurity policy since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to new research from Centrify, a leading provider of Identity-Centric Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions.

The survey of 200 UK business decision-makers, conducted by independent polling agency Censuswide, also revealed that almost two-thirds (65%) of companies have made substantial changes to their cybersecurity policy in response to COVID-19 and 100% remote working. Despite this, 58% agreed that employees are more likely to try and circumvent company security practices when working from home – indicating a fundamental flaw in the execution of security measures in a remote-working model.

In an effort to combat poor security practices from employees, 57% of business decision-makers revealed that they are currently implementing more measures to securely authenticate employees. Such measures include biometric data checks, such as fingerprint and facial recognition technology, and other multi-factor authentication steps when gaining access to certain applications, files, and accounts.

Also, more than half (55%) of businesses already have, or plan to formally ban staff from using personal devices to work from home.

Andy Heather, VP, Centrify comments:
“With more people than ever working from home and left to their own devices, it’s inevitable that some will find security work arounds, such as using personal laptops and not changing passwords, in order to maximise productivity. It’s also possible that the changes in security procedures are not being communicated well to employees, and many are practising unsafe internet usage without even realising.The reality is the weakest link in any organisation continues to be the human element. Combatting this issue starts from the top. CIOs and business decision makers must implement strict and transparent, cloud enabled and identity-centric security solutions. This will allow companies to quickly and safely deploy scalable security privileged access management measures, which make it impossible for an employee to access company networks, applications and data, unless they are following correct procedures.”

Centrify Identity-Centric PAM is designed to handle requesters that are not only human but also machines, services, and APIs. For increased assurance, best practices now recommend strongly authenticated individual identities – not shared accounts – where least privilege can be applied. All controls must be dynamic and risk-aware, which requires modern machine learning and user behavior analytics. PAM must integrate and interoperate with a much broader ecosystem including the cloud providers, DevSecOps tools, containers, microservices, and more.

About Centrify
Centrify is redefining the legacy approach to Privileged Access Management by delivering multi-cloud-architected Identity-Centric PAM to enable digital transformation at scale. Centrify Identity-Centric PAM establishes trust, and then grants least privilege access just-in-time based on verifying who is requesting access, the context of the request, and the risk of the access environment. Centrify centralizes and orchestrates fragmented identities, improves audit and compliance visibility, and reduces risk, complexity, and costs for the modern, hybrid enterprise. Over half of the Fortune 100, the world’s largest financial institutions, intelligence agencies, and critical infrastructure companies, all trust Centrify to stop the leading cause of breaches – privileged credential abuse.

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