Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2019 surprised information security practitioners in the organizations due to the change imposed on employees’ work routines. Employees were asked to work from home, and therefore changes were necessary to reduce information security risks actively. The abrupt change of work environments brought many challenges to the practitioners, which caused them to make decisions regarding organizational information security. This article aims to uncover those challenges through an ethnography study within an organization during the fourteen months of teleworking. On an overarching level, we found four challenges to be of concern: technical security, regulations and policies, employee awareness of security issues, and, finally, preparedness for the new work environment of teleworking. We believe that the challenges brought by the analysis will inspire discussions about the future of research and practice regarding information security management in case of disasters.
Highlights
Challenges of Managing InformationIn mid-January 2020, the public health agency of Sweden [1] reported on their official website for the first time that there was a new virus spreading through China
Understanding abrupt changes in the work environment imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic on IT and information security management is crucial, given the consequences of increased cyberattacks globally during this period
Analyzing the challenges of such abrupt changes in security management paves the way towards better preparedness for future crises and a secure transition to teleworking
Summary
Challenges of Managing InformationIn mid-January 2020, the public health agency of Sweden [1] reported on their official website for the first time that there was a new virus spreading through China. Because of the problematic situation, a recommendation from the Sweden’s public health agency was presented on March 16 [2], which encouraged everyone to work from home to prevent any further spread of the coronavirus. This recommendation would affect information security in many organizations because the pandemic presented new challenges and reshuffled priorities of issues concerning information security [3]. A reason for the potential effect on information security could be that more employees started working from home, and the way employees handled information was new to them [4]. Information security is the protection of information and its critical elements, such as any system or hardware that uses, stores, or transmits information [16,17,18]
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