While COVID-19-driven office closures are taking their toll, some aspects of this crisis may actually be beneficial for business. There are solutions available that save you money now and in the long term.
The work must go on, and it goes on now from home. Document review work by contract attorneys and other staff work at home exponentially increases the threat of cybersecurity breaches and leaks as people work on unsecured home computers. Personal email is vulnerable, and even the well intentioned may accidentally expose confidential data to others. But there is some good news that’s come from this new reality.
Reorient Your Talent Landscape
The constraints of the current quarantine may actually open up your talent pool. There’s a new opportunity to hire people working from home around the country, or around the world. In the past, you might have sought local candidates — folks who could reasonably commute into your office. Once work-from-home is accepted and proven safe, the world of talent is open to you.
If your firm operates in a large city like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago or Washington DC, rates for document review attorneys are on the higher side of the scale — even today. Now you have the option to engage reviewers who live outside your metro area who, today, may have materially lower compensation expectations. The combination of an excellent and cost-effective information security protocol, reviewers who bring their own equipment to the role, and reduced hourly rates, can combine to yield huge savings.
Workers of the world
The worldwide coronavirus lock-downs have forced organizations to shut their doors. The effects could be long term.
The pandemic may indeed reduce your organization’s brick and mortar footprint. Overall operational costs are down since your offices went completely remote due to COVID-19. Management may take a hard look at the budget and decide that the business can permanently cut down on real estate costs.
You might think that the sharp rise of remote workers is accompanied by a sharp decrease in data security. But it doesn’t have to correlate. A remote security platform that was designed to address all the pitfalls of remote work ensures that cybersecurity remains robust.
Reduce the cost of data leaks and break-ins
Cybercrime is expensive. According to Kaspersky, the average cost of recovery from a single security incident is estimated to be $86.5K for small and medium businesses and $861k for enterprises. It’s estimated that the annual global cost of business cyber attacks is $600 billion USD.
It doesn’t matter if your firm is small or large. You could be subject to data breaches, and unfortunately a growing number of incidents arise from insiders — even some who have authorized access to confidential documents.
Less obvious costs of cybercrime
Speaking of clients, any data breach you experience puts your reputation on the line and causes clients to seek other service providers. While you can’t put a price tag on trust, losing client trust is deeply damaging to your revenue. And the opposite is also true: when your clients know that you have an ironclad solution in place, you gain trust.
Increase uptime and reduce the number of employees who are offline due to security issues, or wasting time trying to solve security issues rather than work on revenue producing projects.
Good cybersecurity does a lot more than just keep your data safe. When you have a distributed workforce, consider all the costs and potential savings.
