Fear surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic has seen U.S. businesses shift the mass of their workforce to remote operations. However, the work-from-home scenario significantly heightens the risk of security threats, which mounts a host of operational challenges companies are now facing, according to Scott Crawford, vice president at S&P Global Market Intelligence Research.

“There are going to be quite a few new and opportunistic attacks and we are already seeing access to information becoming a pretty serious issue as well as organizations try to preserve their approach to security monitoring and management,” Crawford said during the “Remote Work Tech Challenges: A Marathon, Not a Sprint” webinar hosted by S&P Global Intelligence on April 1.

In March, S&P’s 415 Research company conducted a flash survey to look into the impact of the coronavirus outbreak and found that 78% of companies had already experienced a negative operational impact and 41% had seen a strain on their IT resources.

“This disruption could introduce an opportunity to rethink security architecture fundamentally,” Crawford said. “But, organizations are very reluctant to bite off more than they can chew especially in the midst of a crisis.”

To combat the operational impact of the virus, some companies are ramping up spending on technologies. The research showed there has been a 63% uptick for employee communication technologies and 55% for bandwidth and network capacity.

On the side of security, virtual private network (VPN) has been a very significant adoption. Companies have spent 46% more on information security software and tools with the goal aimed at strengthening their internal and external IT structure, Crawford said.

“When remote access is needed, one of the things commonly used to facilitate that is VPN because a lot of legacy applications don’t have provisions for access control of remote connectivity which enterprises usually build for their own personnel,” Crawford said.

Instead of shoveling all traffic back to the enterprise VPN, he said companies should be moving towards facilitating the expansion of remote work to “spin the capability for access control, security visibility and threat prevention by interfering as little as possible with remote access given directly to all resources being a third-party host or for those on an enterprise.”

In the near-term, he anticipates increased VPN licenses and scale of existing investments. Between six months to two years, he said organizations will pick up their investment in more modern and responsive technologies to remote access such as zero-trust initiatives that rely on the attributes of the end user and the context of access rather than a simple tactic like a password, which can be easily compromised.

Furthermore, the survey showed that four out of 10 businesses experienced a sudden drop in their workforce’s productivity. A third of the companies have delayed the hiring of staff with 21% expecting to furlough workers. Furthermore, 22% had to halt rolling out new products or services.

Chris Marsh, S&P Global’s research director at 415 Research, highlighted a few challenges businesses are facing starting with a highly dynamic and unpredictable external environment.

While many businesses are taking the lead from public policy, Marsh noted that aligning things like the corporate performance management (CPM) [MOU1] and other business systems can assure that the right data is being fed to the right decision makers. Leveraging intelligent tools like scenario analysis can provide a variety of feasible strategies and responses that companies could have prepped before more unexpected events unfold from the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

A significant revelation the research showed was that of the 65% of companies that have expanded their universal remote work policies, 38% expect to make it long-term or even permanent. Additionally, 74% of companies have implemented travel limitations, 62% have delayed or canceled events and roughly 60% have enacted limitations on both external and internal in-person meetings.

Data and analytics firm GlobalData reported on April 2 that China, the world’s biggest importer of crude, is experiencing cascading effects on forward and backward industrial supply chains, as well as oil and gas projects across the value chain as a result of the virus and oil price crash. Subsequently, this is expected to negatively affect the cost and timeline of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) projects.

“In this difficult situation, key challenges for EPC projects are the supply chain, workforce management, increased subcontracting work timelines dependency, and subsequent cost over-runs. There could be a need for contract renegotiation, with project owners due to contract compliance issues that might further strain the overall project financing for EPC companies,” said Pritam Kad, oil and gas analyst at GlobalData.

The company’s report “COVID-19 Impact on Oil & Gas EPC Projects” found $1.2 trillion capex in announced or planned newbuild and expansion projects across the value chain, which are expected to commence operations during 2020-2022.

“The COVID-19 outbreak, and the subsequent drop in oil prices, is creating a roadblock for future EPC projects as the oil and gas demand-supply metrics is putting pressure on the existing upstream projects itself,” Kad said. “This situation is not lucrative for the new onstream projects. Some of the current approval/FEED stage projects that are proposed to be completed by 2022 may also take the reevaluation process. They may consider the specific clauses in contracts or negotiation with respect to unforeseen events, such as COVID-19 and future impacts, project timelines review or suspension, investment decision and safety and risk management restructuring.”

On the upside, the S&P Global experts said companies should anticipate new competitive opportunities. Particularly, utilizing crowdsourcing to engage employees with gathering ideas on strategic company initiatives, Marsh said.

“If you use that tool, especially now, it is a way to sort of raise your head and get out of the weeds, and tap into ideas and inspiration that maybe otherwise you wouldn’t be capturing,” he said. “At this time, it is important to stay connected to external ecosystems of partners, influencers and other stakeholders.”

While the string of events warrants reorganizing priorities and business strategies, Marsh warns against quick fixes for productivity. “Think very carefully about where to focus and invest, and what the implications will be of different technology strategies.”