Business leaders have always supervised and monitored employees to ensure productivity and engagement. Traditionally, these teams were supervised in a controlled facility. But now most are working from home — with a majority shifting to working from home at least one day per week. The downside: home offices are uncontrolled and unsupervised, which creates a breeding ground for unauthorized data access and productivity losses. This creates long-term productivity and data security challenges, especially for those under HIPAA, PCI and GDPR — all of which mandate employee monitoring as a contractual obligation.
Eliminate Double Standards
There’s no longer a debate about whether virtual or on-premises contact centers are better. The debate now lies in how to unify expectations of at-home and on-premises agents as the new working dynamic becomes the norm.
So, while where employees work has permanently changed, user access to sensitive data and compliance regulations have not. Traditional methods to protect sensitive data by monitoring activities in controlled environment fail address the internal, insider threat of data extraction using cell phone audio/video recording, manual transcriptions, resource impersonation and location spoofing.
The ability to work from anywhere has expanded the information security (“InfoSec”) perimeter to cover every remote location as a potential sensitive data extraction point. This makes customer emails, phones, credit cards, social security, passports numbers and corporate trade secrets highly vulnerable to data extraction and dissemination. Unprotected sensitive information can cause regulatory compliance violations for HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, PII and legal jeopardy. And it likely invalidates cybersecurity insurance policies.
Insider threat continues to be a problem for organizations, regardless of size or industry. Companies are trying to mitigate this risk by continuously investing in tools, people and processes.
Data Abuse
Hackers have exploited the coronavirus pandemic to expand their campaigns of attacks against businesses worldwide. From January to April alone, there was a 238% rise in attacks on banks and a 600% increase in attacks on cloud servers, according to Forbes. The Ponemon Institute “2020 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report” revealed a 47% increase in the number of insider-generated cybersecurity incidents in the past two years.
Moreover, the cost of cybersecurity incidents is increasing as well, rising 31% since 2018. According to Ponemon, insider threats cost companies an average of $11.5 million per year. These expenses are the result of compliance failures, legal penalties, damage to the organization’s reputation and more. Sometimes, these insider incidents can lead to loss of the entire business — larger or small.
Solutions
Increasingly, employers use nontraditional employee monitoring tools, and employees are growing more comfortable with that, according Gartner.
By using a workspace monitoring service like Agent Interact, businesses can uses webcams and anomaly detection to retain visibility to their staff — regardless of work location. Streaming video is bandwidth- and computer-intensive, which can make it difficult for large teams to use. Instead, Agent Interact uses small webcam snapshot images from every active workspace every 60seconds. In addition, the Genesys CloudTM softphone is embedded into the monitoring solution, so workspace images are linked to every customer interaction.
Workspace monitoring delivers visual proof that team members are being productive while also protecting sensitive data. It also allows you to:
- Maintain regulatory “clean desk” compliance
- Suppress unauthorized data exfiltration
- Increase agent productivity and engagement
- Enable sharing of team knowledge
- Improve onboarding and employee retention
Be sure to register for the live webinar on October 22 at 8 AM PT to learn how to maintain work-from-home productivity and compliance with remote monitoring.
This blog post was co-authored by Matt Gabrielson. Matt is Founder of Trendzact, has designed and sold enterprise solutions to Fortune 500s for over a decade. He is now focused on helping companies more efficiently supervise large teams, especially those now working from home. Matt Gabrielson’s LinkedIn
Trendzact has global first-mover advantage for a new category “workspace monitoring” and our platform protects sensitive data, maintains regulatory “clean desk” compliance & enhances productivity regardless of workplace location. The platform easily deploys to monitor, detect, and contain workspace vulnerabilities, reduces supervisory costs, and establishes compliance safeguards for contact center and help desks. Trendzact’s LinkedIn
