Almost all (99%) of IT security professionals surveyed globally said their organisations transitioned to remote work because of COVID-19, and in Singapore less than a third (29%) described that transition as “smooth,” according to One Identity.
The identity-centred security firm commissioned Dimensional Research for a survey conducted between August 20 and September 3 and covered 1,216 IT security stakeholders.
Respondents were based in the United States, Canada, the United Kindgom, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Nordic countries.
Almost three in every five (59%) respondents indicated that cloud infrastructure is more important now than 12 months ago, and in Singapore with 28% attributing this shift directly to COVID-19.
Identity management became more important for 65% of Singaporeans, with almost a quarter (24%) attributing this shift to the pandemic. One quarter of them acknowledged that the pandemic impacted their identity management compliances, indicating a huge security risk that organisations dealt with due to sudden move to remote working.
“This research revealed that identity management has been a major focus for many enterprises in Singapore amid the pandemic as IT teams pivoted the transitions into a remote workforce,” said Serkan Cetin, technical director for APJ at One Identity.
“However, pre-COVID security processes and strategies have not been fully effective in supporting the new working environment, and the sudden shift to remote working has resulted in challenges to ensuring secure access, third-party administration, and maintaining governance across application accesses and data,” said Cetin.
When compared to 12 months ago, 48% of respondents in Singapore are placing a higher priority on access request technologies and 27% said this change in prioritisation is because of COVID.
Only 45% of IT security professionals in Singapore indicated they are fully prepared for the IT changes necessary when their employees move back to organisations’ offices, according to survey results. Yet, 59% of Singaporeans expressed increased confidence in the effectiveness of their identity management programmes post COVID-based changes.
“The increase in successful attacks discovered during COVID-19 clearly shows us that we must find better and more reliable ways of securing applications and data, meeting regulatory compliance requirements, whilst providing the capability to be better prepared for future events” said Cetin.
