Work from Home: Possibilities and Challenges ahead

When the entire world is grappled by the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, business houses are churning on the possibility of distributing most of their work to employees at home.

Currently, it may not be possible, especially firms in the manufacturing sector to adopt this change, but slowly and surely they are also thinking about the way out for not calling their employees to office and possible part of their work can be done from home.

Most of the service sector industries have already asked employees to work from home and to continue following social distancing norms by reducing or completely eliminating the need to come to the office. Prominent example of this is Facebook, which has asked its employees to continue work from home till December 2020. Google and Twitter have also taken similar steps. Microsoft has asked their staff to work from home till October 2020.

Indian IT giant TCS also plans to reduce the strength of employees working at its facility to 25% by 2025. They call it the 25/25 model.

Eliminating the need to attend office physically has two broad advantages. First, it reduces the point of physical contact and maintains social distancing as the vaccine on the disease is yet to be found. Secondly, IT companies are greatly burdened by the heavy costs of running the infrastructure like office buildings and related expenses. These recurring costs can be controlled or tamed down by shifting into lesser space.

HCL is also following TCS and Infosys’s way of asking only 50% of employees to attend office.

One big challenge

But there is also another side to the story. It is rather important and makes them rethink the implementation of the above idea.

It is about the threat to the privacy of the data.

When you work in an office environment at these IT companies, their network has a lot of security features and layers installed. It makes it quite tougher for attackers to hack. But if a person is working from home, company’s data is vulnerable to attackers, And attackers can relatively easily break into the network and steal confidential data.

Such hacked corporate data has already started appearing on the dark web with a 62% rise in the first quarter of 2020. The share of data from the Indian was 8.1% earlier. But this could go on rise because of WFH (work from home) since the lockdown began in India.

Incidents are reported that data from TrueCaller, unacademy, Jio’s coronavirus self-check symptom checker’s data and zoom logins details were also hacked and put on dark web for sale. Also, data of 2.9 Cr Indian job seekers is compromised according to a report.

This possesses greater threat for tech companies and opens up vulnerabilities in their system.

A right balance is to be struck between the security of the network and private data on one hand and overall safety of company’s employees by maintaining physical distancing on the other.