Protecting your workforce

Issue 5 2021 Information Security

The workforce is any organisation's greatest asset but also its biggest risk. It has never been more important to protect employees from exploitation by external attackers, while also limiting the risk that they pose as trusted insiders.

The erosion of the cyber-perimeter and accelerated shift to virtual workforce models necessitate a new approach that baselines activities and behaviours and protects employees by highlighting anomalies. More importantly, employees have the right to know that personal activities and behaviours that don't directly increase organisational risk, cause cultural conflict, or limit successful operations, remain private and anonymous.

Monitoring the workforce to identify non-productive employees is counterproductive and creates a culture of mistrust. The focus must shift to learning from the workforce – observing employees' interactions with data, systems and machines – and using that intelligence to improve performance.

Protect your data and respect your workforce

Workforce Cyber Intelligence is a new approach to enterprise data collection and analysis that focuses on understanding how, when, why, where and for how long employees and third parties interact with data, machines, applications and their peers as they perform their job responsibilities to create a safer, smarter and more secure enterprise.

Workforce Cyber Intelligence is designed for today’s modern, distributed workforce model. It provides complete visibility into user and account activity, keeping all data anonymous to protect privacy and only shining a light on abnormal or inefficient behaviours that indicate risks and areas for operational improvement.

By collecting and analysing employee and third-party interactions with data, machines and applications, Workforce Cyber Intelligence supports a wide range of use cases. Firstly, it supports employee wellness by identifying employees at risk of burn-out.

Workforce Cyber Intelligence optimises asset and licence utilisation, it reveals why employees are using enterprise assets to help IT and procurement teams understand what’s working and what’s not. Furthermore, it protects the organisation from insider threats by identifying patterns of behaviour and preventing threats before they become realised risks.

The solution offers remote worker security, protecting WFH employees beyond corporate firewalls or network proxies. Workforce Cyber Intelligence also informs conversations about individual performance, professional development and growth strategies.

Other benefits include measuring team performance for informed financial and operational planning and data loss prevention by understanding malicious intent long before traditional DLP measures are triggered. It also provides PoPIA and GDPR compliance by anonymising data to satisfy legislative requirements.

With Workforce Cyber Intelligence, organisations can reduce legal liability by identifying the personal online activities that put the enterprise at risk, while still protecting employee privacy. One can now monitor employees without violating trust or privacy.




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