Australian compliance: Working from home isn’t just about moving your office computer home

COVID-19 has displaced workforce around the world, including offshore locations where staff are usually working in a secure office environment.

Many offshore providers note their security restrictions such as no iphones in the office, 24 hour security guards, restricted fingerprint access to office environment. The list goes on.

What’s really interesting, is many of these have jumped on the internet and mentioned they sent their entire X hundred or X thousand workforce home in 24 hours.

The mind boggles.

What additional layers of security were implemented to ensure the security of Australian confidential data? What things were done to make up for the reduction in the security of the environment.

Many office computers contain residual security issues, information stored in buffers, information stored on hard disks, passwords stored in browsers. Moving that computer to a home environment is a risk. The risk is not just that the computer could be stolen, or the data seen by someone visiting the environment, but the access from the home will not likely be by a secure line. More likely the home WiFi network.

And what of the iphone limitations, physical access and all the other features.

It looks like in the rush to move offshore staff to the home environment that many offshore providers have simply given a cursory nod to security, and certainly not “doubled down” on the security to protect the Australian accounting firm data.

If you’d like to talk more about Odyssey’s very secure outsourcing offering then drop us a line.

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