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How Cybersecurity Enables Government, Health, EduTech Cope With COVID-19

The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact on our society has resulted in many dramatic changes to how people are traveling, interacting with each other, and collaborating at work.

There are several trends taking place as a consequence of the outbreak, which has only continued to heighten the need for the tightest possible cybersecurity.

Tools for Collaboration


There has been a massive spike in the adoption of Tools for Collaboration as a consequence of COVID-19.

Concerns about the coronavirus have caused an enormous increase in remote working, with many organizations requiring or at least encouraging their workers to stay at home—especially when cities, states, and even some entire nations are ultimately into lock down in a bid to spread the stem of the disease.

Meanwhile, with millions working from home for many weeks now, there has been a spike in the video conferencing and online collaboration software, many of which are fortunately entirely free, allowing organizations to integrate them with their internal apps for better performance.

Working from home can initially be a bit of the challenge. But it's also true that many organizations that have previously been reluctant to adopt remote working as a practice have now had little option but to embrace it.

There have been long many misconceptions in regards to remote working, but the worldwide pandemic has resulted in universal adoption of the practice that has forced previously dubious managers and executives to realize that remote working can actually have a massively positive impact on employee productivity, mental health, the environment, work-life balance, and expenses.

As a result, many organizations have already started planning to incorporate flexible and remote working models into their schedules on a more permanent basis—even after the Covid-19 crisis is over.

According to recent research published by global research and advisory company Gartner, the work culture move could be permanent for nearly half the workforce.

Remote working applications


Apparently, the number of applications needed to enable more remote working—especially on a more permanent basis—is clearly going to increase, and so will the number of customers and partners focused on Internet-facing applications.

Therefore, the availability and criticality of these applications will be extremely crucial for the future sustainability of the remote working practice, as well as enable businesses to collaborate and share information with their stakeholders, something that is only going to grow in importance.

Because there is inevitably going to be a massive spike in internet-facing applications that will be of vital importance for such businesses, there will be an even greater focus on ensuring security is tight enough to make certain business continuity.

The Increasing Importance of Cybersecurity


Many serious businesses have already long-held cybersecurity as one of the most important issues that they face in the modern age, but with the increasing importance of remote working, it is only going to become an even more integral aspect of the future planning process for companies.

cybersecurity code of practice


Having the best cybersecurity in place will allow quickly launching of a higher number of applications, ensuring that a business is better placed to cope not only with the current Covid-19 crisis but also to ensure the sustainability of future behavior after the pandemic has run its course.

There are several essential verticals that businesses will need to learn to cope with as quickly as possible due to many factors resulting from Covid-19, including:

  • the need for government to provide consumers more digital services,
  • the quick adoption of remote learning by the education sector, and
  • the need for the health system to develop innovative methods to deal with capacity problems.


The Solution


The solution to these problems will be greater collaboration and digitization and the embracing of focused consumer apps within these sectors.

Cybersecurity needs to be seen as a method to quickly achieve these goals without any compromises to safety or the benefits that it is actually intended to deliver.

How to Approach the Cybersecurity Issue


Several things need to be provided by any approach to cybersecurity, including:


  1. Making exploitable risks to applications visible regularly.
  2. Providing businesses with the capability of mitigating such risks in real-time to ensure business continuity is maintained, given that a breach can have severe costs besides transactional and brand loss, including a loss of productivity when teams rely on such applications to successfully complete their work.
  3. Partnering with sector experts and businesses that provide these services, with the increase in demand, is likely to result in faster innovation that will make adoption more straightforward for companies without the need to create in-house expertise.
  4. Approach Cybersecurity as an enabler for businesses, allowing organizations to be more agile, faster, and fearless being digital while mitigating the continuity risks.


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