The pandemic has led to many workplaces adopting a hybrid setup where a number of its employees work from home and while it has since become a norm, cybersecurity threats remain as work devices can be quite vulnerable being outside the protection of the corporate network.
One of the more vulnerable industries is business process outsourcing (BPO) which is why technology leaders HP and Intel held a webinar titled Forging a Safety (Inter) Net for the Agents to show the importance of having ample security, especially while working from home.
“The common misconception is that ‘I have an antivirus and I have a firewall, and we’re good.’ But now, especially in an era of a dispersed workforce where more and more employees are working from home, and a big proportion of BPO agents are working from home, the threats and the risks of vulnerability are much higher,” Christian Edmond Reyes, Managing Director of HP Philippines and Pakistan, said in the recently held webinar.
Data from 2019 showed that an estimated 1.3 million Filipinos work in BPO companies, making it a significant contributor to the country’s GDP. The IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) expects that the industry will grow by 5.5 percent within the next two years. With the current health and safety restrictions in place, the association figured that an average of 70 percent of the workforce is still working from home.
Currently the industry has adopted tools including suites of services that provide security including virtual private networks or VPNs or getting security-hardened commercial PCs like those in HP’s Pro and Elite series.
“Hackers will actually come up with new tricks, new attacked every single day, every few minutes so it’s absolutely a must to make sure each PC or endpoint is secured,” Yuan Zhi Luo, Services GTM Manager at HP, said.
At the security policy level, she suggested that companies adopt a “zero-trust policy” where every untrusted source of email or documents is treated and every removable file drive is considered a potential threat. There is also a need, she said, to ensure proper endpoint protection when connecting to public Wi-Fi hotspots that may be unsecured or use outdated security measures. At length, Ms. Yuan suggested BPO companies should establish a streamlined modern device management lifecycle, starting from when the IT device is issued to an agent.
