It should come as no surprise to anyone who has lived through the last three years that the way we work has changed drastically. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to figure out how to better enable their employees to work from home securely and easily. The result was an acceleration of trends that were already underway. Work is now hybrid, and adaptability and flexibility continue to be key requirements for organizations working to secure a distributed hybrid workforce.

Organizations seeking cyber insurance coverage are typically required by their insurer to provide evidence of a panoply of controls around information security, disaster recovery, and related risk and technology requirements and best practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic has indelibly changed the way we all work. As the world has opened back up and organizations have begun making the return to the office, many employees still want a hybrid work model. In an ideal hybrid working model, employees feel empowered and more productive given the freedom to do their work from any location or device, whenever it’s most convenient. Users need fast, secure access to their data, regardless of where their applications are located.

It’s been over two years since offices around the world closed their doors, sending employees to work from home to ride out a series of pandemic lockdowns. Those two years saw a succession of commands to close, reopen, close again, and reopen again, during which office workers in many industries embraced remote work and the benefits of eliminating the commute and providing a better work-life balance.

Two years ago, the world shut down. We all lived through the start of the pandemic, when the world’s white-collar workforce was sent home en masse. Remote work became the only option for employees in many positions across many companies. This working environment was isolating, and staff required entirely new workflows just to keep business processes functional—but we survived it.

Data no longer resides behind the four walls of the traditional enterprise perimeter—it’s everywhere, and can be accessed from seemingly anywhere, thanks to the rapid embrace of cloud by enterprises and the acceleration of hybrid work, or work-from-anywhere, behind the global pandemic.

It should be no surprise that both knowledge workers and the companies that employ them want to benefit from hybrid work environments. After two years of a new remote workplace routine, businesses must provide workplace flexibility to compete for the best talent, allowing employees the option of working from a corporate office or elsewhere.

As people start coming back to the office after working from home exclusively for two years, a hybrid work model will pose a series of challenges for security teams. One of these challenges involves reminding and reeducating workers about security best practices after two years of working remotely and using decentralized services.