A Study of Risk Assessment Quantification for Secure Telework

Abstract

In Japan, telework is attracting renewed attention due to the government-led "work style reform". The advent of COVID-19 in 2020 has led to the rapid spread of telework, and the current state of widespread use may be attributed to transient factors as a counter to the spread of COVID-19 infection. A current problem is that dealing with the emergence of risks has been postponed or overlooked because telework was hastily promoted and introduced even though sufficient preparations had not been made. In this work, we conducted a risk assessment from the viewpoints of both companies and employees to identify 28 risk factors and proposed countermeasures for these factors in order to make teleworking permanently safe and secure in the new normal era. The results revealed that the introduction of Mobile Device Management (MDM) to teleworking terminals is effective as the main countermeasure on the corporate side. The study also clarified that the establishment of various systems related to the telework environment and the use of cloud computing are effective as measures for both companies and employees. We also evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed risk measures in terms of risk values and found that these could be reduced by approximately 61%. Our findings will contribute to the safe and secure use of telework in the new normal era.