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As the threats related to information security increase, our approaches to security issues must be adapted.
Almost 2 years after the beginning of the pandemic, a lot has changed in the way we work and live. One of the most signifcant changes in terms of IT and security is the rapid shift of many employees to remote working environments. For many, this means working from home (WFH) full-time; for others, it entails working in a hybrid scenario in which the work environment may shift from a traditional offce location to a remote location.
Because of this shift, the IT infrastructure in most organizations has had to quickly adapt to changing needs. In the WFH context, the scope of an organization's network has inherently expanded to include the remote networks where workers are now located. By defnition, this expansion intrinsically increases the potential areas of security exposure for the organization. At the same time, all of this is occurring in an environment in which information security issues in general have been rapidly escalating. Considering a recent study indicating that 78% of organizations had experienced at least one signifcant security exposure in the past year, the urgency to adapt security plans to address a changing environment is high (Osterman Research 2019).
Another issue for libraries and information agencies is that many of the services we provide are outside of our direct control. Information resources and enterprise systems have moved from in-house to being hosted in the cloud and managed by third-party entities. Not only do we need to consider the potential impact these externally hosted systems might have on our network, we also need to plan for how a security incident in these external vendor networks could impact our operations.
An additional issue we need to consider is that societal expectations related to security and privacy are also rapidly changing. While people often espouse the need for a high level of privacy, many people think nothing of having a device in their home that controls the various appliances within it. Regardless of what particular device is used, they all collect a voluminous amount of detailed data related to our day-to-day habits and preferences, and people are more than willing to provide that information (Rao 2018). At...