Remote Working And Data Protection: A Pandemic Year In Review

The Covid-19 pandemic caused a massive shift toward remote working in 2020. Generally, this shift was smoother than expected, with most companies indicating that the transition to working from home had been successful and productivity had remained the same or actually improved during the pandemic. The transition, however, also presented a number of challenges, particularly in the fields of data protection and privacy.

Perhaps the biggest of those challenges was (and continues to be) cybersecurity. In 2020, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center or IC3 received a record number of complaints, up 69% from 2019, with reported losses exceeding $4.1 billion. Ransomware attacks, in particular, grew exponentially during the pandemic, and research suggests remote working significantly increases the risk of a successful ransomware attack.