Last year’s rapid and sometimes erratic transition to remote work left many businesses looking for new ways to understand employee behavior when working from home. According to a survey of 2,000 employers offering remote or hybrid work, 78 percent deployed employee monitoring software to track worker behavior in the past six months. As businesses emerge from the recent pandemic, it’s clear that some things will not return to business as usual.

Messaging apps security is, along with other security concerns, one of the biggest must-haves when it comes to digital transformation. As workplaces move from the physical world into a digital one, employers are looking to ensure highest security standards while fostering the culture of collaboration. However, there are some challenges they encounter along the way.

Secure messaging apps have always been highly valued among their consumers – but the security ladder keeps going higher and higher. The technology is advancing at a high speed, and organizations are trying to ensure the strictest security standards for messaging apps their employees use. Namely, ever since the abrupt switch to a remote work environment in 2020, companies are seeing a rise in cybersecurity breaches.

As businesses emerge from a pandemic year, cybersecurity concerns are necessarily top of mind . Companies face expansive cybersecurity threats on many fronts, prompting 75 percent of business leaders to view cybersecurity as integral to their organization’s COVID-19 recovery. They undoubtedly face an uphill battle. Surging ransomware attacks and increasingly deceptive phishing scams are attracting national attention, while more than 500,000 cybersecurity jobs remain unfilled in the US alone.

In December 2020, we blogged about security issues in Go’s encoding/xml with critical impact on several Go-based SAML implementations. Coordinating the disclosure around those issues was no small feat; we spent months emailing the Go security team, reviewing code, testing and retesting exploits, coming up with workarounds, implementing a validation library, and finally reaching out to SAML library maintainers and 20 different companies downstream.

Security concerns continue to be in the news around the world with the White House issuing an executive order earlier this summer about cybersecurity and the European Union proposing a Joint Cyber Unit to respond to the rising number of security incidents. And the hacking story that won't go away with the "SolarWinds" hackers launching a new global cyberattack at the end of May.

The recent pandemic pushed medical facilities and staff to the brink, taxing resources, exhausting employees, and disrupting decades of norms and protocols. It also accelerated technological trends that were quickly becoming popular, namely the centrality of technology and data in patient care. Today, many medical practices are digital-first operations, embracing telehealth and remote work at far greater levels than before the pandemic.