The gig economy has put corporate data at risk

Compounding the complexity of remote working, a recent rise in the gig economy is spreading enterprise data security issues even wider, as workers are brought in on a brief timeframe to fill specific roles and tasks.  Unfortunately, this fleeting arrangement further increases the attack surface whereby hackers can breach the network, spreading workers outside the umbrella of an organization’s security.  Its very nature as a distributed workforce creates issues of proper device security, oversight, data flow, and data disposal once the job is done.  

Statistics from the Bureau of Labor show that there were 55 million workers in the gig economy in 2017.  Gig economy income statistics show wages and participation have grown by 33% in 2020. The entire gig workforce has earned $1.7 trillion—a significant increase from $1.2 trillion before the pandemic in 2019. 

In conjunction with this new pattern, a recent swell in desktop data management tools, like SQL Express, and mobile devices has also created new privacy and compliance concerns.  Already the home office is a vulnerability of significant potential for hackers; if you factor in these new realities, how to secure the data in a new framework becomes another strategic necessity.  Research from TechRadar indicates a majority of organizations that plan to maintain flexible remote working policies even after the pandemic has passed.  All of these trends complicate an already tricky situation, as organizations have to adapt to new ways to monitor behavioral activity for anomalies, for example, or have to take an elevated zero-trust policy to devices or networks, for another.  Managing all this can lead to gaps in the security posture.

NetLib Security can help to mitigate the problem?

Securing corporate secrets often centers on the usual perimeter defenses: firewalls, antivirus, or even more advanced layers like employee ID cards and biometric authentication.  But what happens when bad actors inevitably get through, whether through employee negligence or managerial error?

NetLib Security’s Encryptionizer product offers an efficient, cost-effective solution to this evolving scenario providing data encryption out of the box via a simple point-and-click interface.  Regular employees and new gig hires alike hold access to sensitive company data, which can be easily compromised through one mistaken click on a phishing link.  With no additional programming required, our Encryptionizer product helps secure your stored data through a simple install and configuration, rendering it useless to any potential cyber criminals who might gain access to it.  Nor is there any hit to system performance.  Encryptionizer allows for transparent data encryption on any desktop or server database on the Windows platform—from MySQL to PostgreSQL—providing another crucial safeguard against internal errors that may come from gig workers brought on board for a few days.  

Whether legacy systems, servers or distributed applications, SQL Express or mobile devices like the Microsoft Surface, locking down the fort and coming into compliance with current regulations is more critical for enterprises than ever before.

Request a free evaluation here to test its functionality and integration with your operation.