Challenges faced by growing organisations
Growing organisations face a number of issues ranging from investing in technology to taking appropriate measures to secure it.
As the business grows, it demands enhanced security layers and better solutions for newer problems. And the most important part is to track the loopholes and plug in the gaps causing trouble. Also, the processes need to be updated with time and demand because what worked a decade ago might not function as efficiently as they used to. Moreover the companies in the growth stage move at such a pace that manually keeping a track of employees is in no way possible.
Some of the most significant factors hindering a company’s growth are:
- Outdated Technology
- Cyber Attacks and Invasions
- Phishing: Sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies in order to induce individuals to reveal personal information
- Pharming: Redirecting Internet users to a bogus website that mimics the appearance of a legitimate one
- Ransomware: Blocking access to a PC until a ransom is paid
- Keylogger: It tracks the keystrokes in order to store sensitive information
- Inconsistent employee behaviour
- Insider Threat
- Poor supervision
Between 70 and 80% of the top 10 malware detected by the company could have been avoided if there technology was updated timely.
Using outdated technology increases the number of system crashes and significant cost of fixing such issues. As a greater part of your job is spent dealing with system downtime, productivity of the team members is reduced because they hardly get the time to focus on actual business and corresponding deadlines. Apart from cost and time utilisation, it also leaves you unprotected to cyber attacks as the older a software version gets, the lesser number of security updates it receives. And gradually the security support for obsolete softwares is put to a halt, leaving the device even more vulnerable.
For instance: Recently, with the WannaCry intrusion, most affected devices were running on Windows XP which was discontinued from support program back in 2016. So basically, had the users been using a newer version of windows, they would been in a safer situation.
According to reports, devices running on Window
But what are the reasons obstructing the firms from upgrading their technology? The only logical reason listed can be the time and financial effort required.
So basically, if you are regularly updating your software to the latest official firmwares, you stand a better chance of enhancing productive hours in the office and reducing risks of data loss or cyber invasions! And most importantly, it’s the company’s reputation at stake, which needs to be protected for customer’s trust and smooth progress.
70% of organisations report having been compromised by a successful cyber attack in the past 12 months.
The recent trends of corporate attacks carried out through internet have escalated at great rates, thus holding down the company’s success rate. Such attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated with technology advancements and are carried out in a number of stages.
The attacker initiates by simply spying on the targeted endpoint and observes the user’s behaviour, this followed by sending a malicious file to the device being used for intrusion and once the file is accessed at endpoint, it spreads internally to reach the desired storage point to extract information. The self-progressing file paves its own way to remove traces of its activity to create a fail safe exit. And delayed identification of such extensions leads to aggravate the exploitation power of the virus.
Some of the well known virus-processes are:
A lot of labor and effort is wasted dealing with these invasions, thereby limiting the output of employees. Moreover if any such attacks go public it hampers the company’s brand image as well, causing customers to lose faith in the firm, for breachment of their personal information provided to the company.
Of the 8 hours a typical employee spends in office, he’s more likely to spend 90 to 270 minutes on unproductive stuff.
Employees who have the ability to perform decently well but fail to deliver desired outputs on a regular basis may be termed inconsistent for their nature of going via a disoriented path. Such behaviour is easily noticeable and a result of easy-to-influence personality. Such traits are seen in employees who are easily distracted and most of them are carried away with a range of online activities from online shopping to social media involvement.
It’s not always intentional for an employee to stay off track, in fact there are number of reasons for he might not be interested; the very basic one includes lack of knowledge and skills required to function efficiently. In such a case an employee must be inquired for the reasons for under-performance or and must be imparted proper training for healthy functioning of workforce. These issues must be handled maturely as there can be personal factors for his disinterest in work, he might have been going through a financial or family crisis and must be supported to overcome and helped to put his efforts in the right direction.
Thus employers need to find certain ways for encouragement in order to motivate employees for working with their full capabilities and one such technique is setting incentives for employees whenever they achieve records set by the organisation. Thus CXOs need to work out personal strategies for their employees to function efficiently. But in case the employee’s inconsistency continues despite all the measures, managers must analyse the situation and take appropriate decisions.
In nutshell, lack of training and online distractions cause the employees to lose interest and must be looked into to enhance their productivity.
Over 77% data breaches are caused by internal actors and only 11% are by external actors
While we all are indulged in dominating the external hazards, internal threats have been on a rise to hinder employee integrity and obstruct company’s growth. With recent reports, employees are found to be the most impacted party and quite difficult to be audited virtually.
Insider threats may occur for a number of reasons and might be unintentional as well. Besides the generic assaults of data breach for reasons like financial gain, there have also been cases of unintentional errors by employees. For example, (1) Downloading unofficial or personal email attachments on an office computer which might include malware or similar files. (2) Employees may even be fooled to give their credentials for login by a spoof email or be simply blackmailed by the actual attacker. And behind all this disgruntled, the actual attacker gets away without being under suspect.
Insider Threat is taking down the organization by greater effect and must handled with strict laws with in.
With all these listed reasons, the most common factor causing all of it is lack of proper supervision on endpoint devices. In case an organisation monitors the employee behaviour via their daily activities, managers can spot the error while it’s still in control and take measures to safe-guard themselves from future problems. With proper monitoring programs like InDefend being used to track user activity, it becomes quite easy to analyse an individual’s behaviour and control data transfer, both online and offline, across your workplace. It helps maintain transparency among employers and employees and avoid situations of blame game.