Acquiring a Security Foothold in Hybrid Workspaces with Facial Recognition

In 2020, companies experimented with different ways of working as the result of lockdown and Covid-19 restrictions. The best possible alternative was remote working. Although Covid-19 restrictions are easing down and the world is returning to normal life, it will take much time to recover from the aftershocks. 

Numerous companies are moving towards a hybrid working model to bridge the gap between office and remote working that is a practically possible and feasible solution to cater all the requirements of businesses and employees. 

Types of Hybrid Working Models 

The at-will Model

The at-will model lets employees choose an arrangement for working days that suits them best. This model is mostly used by those employees who have to come into the office to meet someone or want a quiet place for working. Some companies are planning to set up a process where employees can place a request for “work from home” to ensure social distancing. 

Split Week Model

This model splits the week in office working and remote working where employees can work three days from home, two days in office or vice versa. Employees prefer this model among others as it offers more flexibility. Companies that use this model, in general, split the days of week between different departments. For instance, a sales team may be working in the office on Monday and Wednesday, while the design team on Tuesday and Thursday. This allows a large number of employees to use the same office building where managers can have one-on-one meetings with teams and regularly get in touch with all of them. 

Week by Week

In this model, employees work from home and office on alternating weeks. This is used to accommodate large teams to use the same workspace at the same time.

Security Challenges of Hybrid Working

Whenever it comes to discuss the challenges of the digital era, security comes at the top. Likewise, hybrid working is also on the verge of frauds and other cybercrimes. Some employees may not be working themselves, but outsourcing their tasks to freelancers or other third-party employees at cheap rates. You may not lose your team productivity through this, but it raises serious concerns about data privacy and security. 

Now, your data is exposed to the outer world, and you can’t protect it anymore. Your employee may be enjoying holidays and the one you are working could be an imposter hired by your employee.

There could be a case where your employee is doing two jobs and in the most dangerous case, the other employer is your competitor. In this scenario, not only your data is compromised, but your future plans and campaigns are exposed to other companies. The other company takes a competitive edge, making it difficult for you to achieve business goals. 

Traditionally in full-time office working, companies use IP-based access where employees can’t access their account outside a specific IP. You can use this during onsite working, but have to provide full access during remote working. IP-based access has a very low level of security and takes more resources. 

Verifying Employees Through Facial Recognition

Facial recognition is a type of biometric authentication technology where the users’ (live or stored) facial data is matched with another sample. Mobile phone unlocking is an associate example, where you just show your face to the front camera, and it checks the similarity with the previously stored sample. 

Facial recognition is regarded as the best way to authenticate users, and verifying identities of customers and employees. As the process is performed in real-time, users do not have to wait for the verification process to complete.

Financial institutions use facial recognition for complying with Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations. Under KYC laws, all the financial service providers are obliged to verify customer identities before account opening and facilitating high-risk transactions. Facial recognition helps in onboarding legitimate and authentic clients only by comparing the live facial data with photo ID. 

Facial recognition can be applied when staff members sign-in to their systems, usually companies give a password-protected system account to each employee. But relying completely on passwords is  insufficient.  Instead, there should be an extra security feature, such as facial recognition. For instance, after password-based authentication, employees can be verified by facial recognition. This can occur in two ways;

1. Employees upload the image of their ID, facial recognition verifies the live sample with the photo on ID
2. The company takes the biometric (facial data) of employees and during facial recognition, the live sample is compared with the stored one. This is robust and fast, the employees do not have to wait for any other process i.e. uploading

The second way seems to be very feasible as it takes as less time as a mobile phone unlocking. Facial recognition verifies the live presence of users, eliminating all the notions of illegitimate onboarding. Among other methods of authentication, facial recognition is more interactive, user-friendly and provides a seamless onboarding process for users. 

What Shufti Offers

Shufti offers a real-time Face Verification solution that performs anti-spoofing checks, 3D depth checking and micro-expressions analysis – all of which assist in weeding out fraudulent players within seconds. Anti-spoof checks help in combating spoofing techniques such as the use of 3-D masks and printed image attempts. Shufti complies with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) giving data privacy, security and integrity.

Want to know how Shufti helps you onboard employees securely?