Workplaces everywhere benefit from efficient intranet software to enable holistic governance and agile processes. The shift to remote and hybrid work environments is facilitated by an intranet portal. Coming off the rising demand for software solutions embedded with responsive applications to run business, refactoring the way you work is how you stay atop.
Knowing your intranet security best practices has become the foundational step to securing all networking endpoints, data, and organization people. This publication answers how intranet security best practices can govern your digital workplace so that you can implement policies with the best interest of your employees in mind.
Importance of Intranet Security Best Practices
Securing your digital workplace is a top priority, and intranet portals are at the core of a successful workplace strategy. Without centralized accessibility tools and secure governance protocols, your data, people, and organization may be at risk. To be prepared, and build your workplace of the future, intranet security must be practiced and administered.
In September 2022, Uber was the victim of a cyber-attack, and its intranet software was globally compromised. This was a result of social engineering tactics used against an Uber employee by a hacker. While the necessity for a robust intranet was evident, this incident also highlights the vulnerability of enterprise systems to hackers.
With workplaces adapting to the new way of work, profoundly reinstated by the global pandemic of COVID-19, intranet security best practices are used to build a fully governed network architectures, secure from threats and responsive to the needs of your organization and its people.
Research conducted during 2022 revealed that cybercriminals can override access to 93% of existing enterprise networks – spurring a high demand for cloud security and efficient workplace solutions. To maintain digital workplaces, implementing comprehensive and universal intranet security best practices will tackle many security concerns that put your data at risk.
To inspire effective and agile transformation at your enterprise, today’s leaders are tasked with a key objective – To build a security culture that responds to the changes in your organization.
What is Company Security Culture?
Empowering your organization with the required expertise to tackle change management is achieved with building a security culture. Emerging from the need to facilitate seamless access to your organization’s resources, a secure workplace culture can only be achieved via continuous adoption and practice of workplace security.
Security culture signifies the activity of people when left to their own devices. Do employees know how to distinguish between harmful links, and decide whether to click or not? Do your employees know the steps taken to assure the security of a new product or service offering? Does your organization secure people and their data to ensure responsible governance? These are all quintessential questions to be answered to enable secure intranet experiences.
To secure your digital workplace, people must be aware of the intranet best practices. Employee-centric and user-generated insights are leveraged to design policies that foster awareness and reinforce digital workplace security. Since your employees are required to proactively communicate and collaborate with each other, an intranet is a common ground where all your processes, people and data are centralized, securely stored and accessed.
A security culture is reinforced by employee-centric intranet policies and protocols aimed at supporting diverse applications and workflows in volume and velocity. Tailored to the unique business requirements of your organization, security culture is professed by leadership and practiced by your employees. To build a digital workplace for your people, you must build off the strengths of your network architecture by securing access to all your digital systems. Empowering your organization with technological agility and refined process governance, everything is in one place with a robust intranet built to engage secure transfers and protocols.
3 Areas to Secure Your Digital Workplace Environment
A security culture is engaged when employees take responsibility for their data protection, and intranet security. Secure digital workplace environments are a result of people leveraging the knowledge and awareness of safeguarding organizational assets and executing actions confidently.
A properly functioning security culture has clear directives and direct implications on organizational performance. But how do you reach that goal, of a futuristic and agile digital workplace reinforced by secure protocols? What system and process changes bring all your employees onboard your vision for digital workplace security? Let’s take a look at some best practices.
To define a clear digital workplace strategy, you should implement the following intranet security best practices right away. Breaking down the three drivers of intranet security into actionable insights, you will reap the rewards of digital agility and workplace flexibility uninterruptedly.
1. Intranet security and people data
An intranet is for your people. Most employees rarely intentionally breach organizational security, but your enterprise on the cloud is always in danger of cyber threats. Leaving your people and organization’s data exposed may result in data loss, theft, and misuse. Often, this risk can be mitigated by raising awareness of intranet security best practices.
Critical to keeping your employees engaged, retained and loyal, a workplace strategy built on secure protocols to protect your people and data has a clear advantage. You can stop actions that lead to security breaches beforehand and maintain the integrity of your networking environment. Whether native cloud applications are used, or custom-built software runs your core processes, a flexible employee intranet protects your people from malicious activities.
Give your IT teams a justified advantage
Your IT teams gain increased visibility over key areas of the business, digitalized to furnish your people with access to the latest software and workflows. Using intranet software, you can run surveys, training sessions, awareness camps and educate your users on security culture. With increased flexibility, your remote and hybrid workforces leverage seamless access to resources for work. People data and user –experience must be protected at any cost.
Some key assessments to include intranet security best practices are by answering the following questions.
- How aware are your co-workers of security threats?
- How tech-savvy are your employees, including remote, hybrid, frontline, and other workers?
- What internal processes and programs can be used to educate the company about intranet security protocols and the need?
Inarguably, you might face challenges in building a security culture, especially if you’ve recently adopted a digital workplace solution for your business, and many employees rely on the same intranet. Knowing where you start though, is important to identify programs and digital tools that empower your people with the security they must-have.
As per Fogg’s Behavior Model, influencing the decisions and habits of people to change entails:
- Ability to change behavior
- Motivation to change
- Awareness of behavioural change triggers and timing
Using your assessment to identify gaps in your network architecture, processes, and people experiences, you can furnish a coherent intranet policy. If your workforce lacks the technical knack, carry out informational and educational activities. Intranet security cannot be ignored!
An intranet is where your communications are coupled with increased connectivity to achieve process agility and organizational performance. IT teams can drive employee adoption of intranet security best practices with governance tools for enterprise data, native to your intranet environment and complementary to your business objectives.
Finding influencers within the organization, advocating employee-centric changes, and leveraging user-generated workplace data are all means by which secure working conditions are adopted using an intranet.
#1 Tip to Implement Intranet Security
Give your employees an open invitation to profess the culture you envision by stressing on intranet security’s importance. Work closely with influencers within your organization, and subject matter experts to instill a sense of enthusiasm for data security. Make it a point to highlight the many benefits of protecting your privacy, access to data, and networking endpoints.
2. Intranet Security Protocols and Policies
According to a new research publication addressing 600 US organizations with 50-500 employees, 63.3% of leaders state that retaining their workforce is harder than hiring people. Amidst the ‘war for talent’ 69% of corporate employees in America also reveal that they’d work harder if they were better appreciated for their contributions.
Using intranet software, HR leaders and management can host rewards and recognition systems to engage the workforce. Centralized access to people directories and social platforms on the intranet offers immense capabilities for employee engagement activities. Having a robust framework of intranet policies and procedures helps your workers gain the most out of their workplace experience. From an educational perspective, enhanced communication efficiency using an intranet regulates compliance adherence within the organization. As more employees are aware and compliant with the latest intranet best practices – a culture of security, accessibility and inclusion is nurtured.
Some commonly executed policy changes to make when implementing digital workplace security are:
- Recording and documenting internal security protocols and procedures
- Role-specific standard operating procedures (SOPs) for network security
- Reward and recognition strategies for intranet users based on user-generated insights
- Workplace diversity and inclusion activities to engage key assets with company updates
In many cases, the lack of awareness among employees results in the above-mentioned actionable procedures being implemented. To ensure security at the most basic level, training resources are made available to your employees using the intranet portal. Centralizing the deployment and maintenance of workplace policies creates a coherent and conscious environment. Labelling and tagging content across your repositories for easy search and availability is an effective way to make the most of your intranet security. When employees need access to resources or information, it should be readily accessed and made available via web or mobile intranet applications.
To harness the benefits of an engaged workforce, auditing your network and incorporating new functionalities helps IT teams identify patterns of content consumption on the intranet. Using this user-generated insight about their workplace experience, administrative privileges are granted to the organization to govern end-to-end operations.
Gamifying the intranet user experience
A key question that arises when refactoring your intranet policies for a secure technical advantage is, how does security culture nurture employee experiences?
An effective way to engage your employees using the intranet portal is via gamification. According to a McKinsey report, well-connected teams see a productivity increment of 20–25%. Data suggest that organizations encouraging employees to minimize silo effects at work by centralizing communication using an intranet, outperform their peers by 3.5 times. Gamifying the user experience of your intranet portal maximizes engagement, where a more engaged employee is more efficient in carrying out job-specific functions.
While user experience gamification is not directly associated with intranet security protocols, the use of interactive workflows inspires an interconnected and more agile work environment. Thereby, deploying a secure intranet policy to govern all your enterprise data is possible.
As employees become more involved, they take ownership of their experience by practicing intranet security best practices, outlining their work-related priorities and staying updated with company news.
How does gamification enable security culture adoption?
Gamification is all around you today, but cyber security is not a game. Stated in an official publication of the Federal Information Systems Security Educators, an excerpt of Brian Burke’s book “Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things” is quoted to describe the impact of gamification on goal setting and productivity.
Gartner Vice President, Brian Burke mentions in his book, “At its core, gamification is about engaging people on an emotional level and motivating them to achieve their goals.”
The book is educates users about gamification in the digital age. You can get the book by searching the title, “Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things” on Amazon.
At the age of agile transformation and workplace reinvention, it’s imperative that new ways of working are succeeded by safer and more secure governance protocols. As Web 3.0 makes headways in innovation and positions intrinsic industrial transformation at the fore, a robust intranet software bridges organizational goals with operational performance across geographies, time zones and diverse functional parameters of your business.
Carefully practiced intranet policies are fundamental to the employee experience and cannot be sterile. Making security fun allows employees to feel less burdened by work, and more actively involved in contributing to the culture of your organization.
3. Secure intranet architectures and technologies
Technology is the backbone of digital transformation for business agility. In rapidly changing industrial settings, the above-mentioned factors signify your roadmap to modernization of the workplace and employee experience. The most important aspect of your digital workplace remains the cybersecurity technology in place to govern all your company activities.
Consolidating your IT functions with a digital risk strategy involves integrating various systems with clearly defined network protocols, secure device interactions and transparent workflows. To reap functional output of your workforce, you must be aware of the intranet flexibility that allows for multiple software integrations and responsive applications.
Using responsive apps for your intranet activity, you can mitigate risks that arise due to voluminous data transfers and storage. As new threats emerge, your intranet’s secure end points allow for predictive measures to retain key assets. Communicating your vision for a digitally transformed workplace stems from the attention to and practice of secure technology being used at work.
IANS Research faculty, Mike Saurbaugh, is an independent consultant and Director, Technical Alliances at Cofense, Faculty at IANS Research, and Queen City Fintech mentor. When interviewed by Security Intelligence he said,
“Developing a comprehensive security awareness program should not be considered as destination, but a journey. It requires dedicated oversight and should be ongoing, with engaging exercises.”
Transform Your Digital Workplace for the Future
The World Economic Forum forecasts that AI and automation will lead to the creation of 97 million new jobs by 2025. As businesses ramp up on the latest digital workplace solutions, it’s evident that security is at the core of calculated business growth. An intranet software being indispensable to the needs of a modernized business environment, promotes employee flexibility by refining the way departments work together.
If you are to leverage the benefits of digital transformation, to position your business for operational control and performance, you require a functionally rich and dynamic intranet software. Saketa’s award-winning Migrator allows businesses to easily transfer bulk data to your preferred environment. Using one-click integrations to move voluminous data seamlessly, Saketa’s highly personalized intranet solution is yours to cater to diverse needs of your business.
Seek a solution that makes you the workplace everybody wants to work at. Get our transformation team to deploy the most secure SharePoint 365 environment.
