After months of lockdown, British employers finally have discretion on whether or not they can safely bring their employees back into physical office spaces. With the responsibility on businesses now, new research from Zscaler the UK and Europe shows how businesses will adjust to the guidelines from governments to return to the workplace, or whether remote working is indeed the new norm.

The study shows that almost half (48%) of all European respondents expect the number of people that will work from away the office to grow by at least 25% and up to 50% in the next 12 months. However, while only 45% of UK respondents are confident that they have a secure remote access infrastructure in place that would support remote working, just over a third (34%) are evaluating new security solutions based on the growing remote workforce requirements.

Ismail Elmas, General Manager & VP EMEA, Zscaler comments: “Despite much talk throughout lockdown around remote working becoming the new normal, it appears that there are different attitudes to this across Europe. Whilst German businesses seem to be most keen to increase remote worker numbers, other nations are more hesitant. It’s worrying that less than half of respondents across the UK, France and Italy are confident in the security of their current remote access infrastructure, but a promising number of companies are re-evaluating their current set-up. Businesses have identified that there’s a lot of work to be done to update their infrastructure, even if the growth in remote worker numbers may be more modest than we’ve anticipated.”

In terms of how remote workers have been accessing their applications and services so far, solutions are as varied as attitudes to remote working. Across Europe a third of remote employees access their corporate apps via remote desktop protocol (RDP) and 30% via remote access VPN solutions. Identity and Access Management, and Zero Trust solutions are less popular with 19% and 17% respectively. In the UK, the most popular solution is RDP (45%), whilst in Germany it’s Zero Trust based solutions (35%). Just over half (52%) of those in France access via remote access VPN, making that the most popular, whilst 51% of Swedes opt for Identity and Access Management.

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The research surveyed over 600 IT decision makers across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and Netherlands in July 2020

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