Corporate security is a catchall term for safeguarding against anything that tries to impede a corporation’s productivity. Dangers might be physical harm to employees themselves or cyberattacks on corporate hardware or software systems.
The threats to personnel safety have increased since the pandemic began. There are several reasons for this. Some businesses have come under fire for publicly siding with social issues, causing people to attack their brands. Others have been attacked for not speaking up. Massive layoffs and an overwhelmed unemployment system contributed to former employees’ elevated anger, becoming another reason physical safety threats increased.
In addition, employees working remotely are as vulnerable and exposed as any other citizen. Although a company’s duty-of-care generally applies to the office, reasonable efforts to ensure safety at home are sometimes enforced in times of urgency. A threat is much more dangerous when there is no front-line protection such as badge systems or security guards, therefore new threat management includes social media monitoring and working with law enforcement to protect employees and upper-level management working from home.
According to the Ontic Center for Protective Intelligence, physical threat activity has jumped 69 percent within the last year. The biggest concerns included keeping employees safe while at home, identifying potential threats before they escalate, and managing the sheer amount of threats from online and offline sources. In addition to the increased threats, the security staff has decreased, leaving a minor protective barrier between employees and danger. Companies have ramped-up safety measures to include better communication between departments, alerting everyone if a potential threat is detected anywhere else in the company. Moving forward, a company’s cybersecurity rating will be just as important as a credit rating when it comes to business relationships.
Employees working from home will also be expected to ramp up their software and hardware in order to maintain the level of security they would have at work. Many seemingly benign tools such as Zoom conferencing were found to be routed through China, prompting the U.S. federal government to declare the platform off-limits.
Viruses, malware, phishing tools, and other scams will never stop trying to access data, personal or professional. This is the reason companies emphasize a rigid schedule for updating antiviral databases. Workers from home also need to abide by common-sense rules such as not clicking suspicious links or opening strange emails.