How has COVID-19 affected security professionals? We asked. - Factal Blog: News about global security, disaster response and crisis collaboration

Factal’s community looks out for each other. We share information and benchmarking through the platform. We even have regular virtual happy hours to maintain connections during the isolation of COVID-19.

So when we asked our members to take a quick survey earlier this month, they responded en masse:

Security responses to a COVID-19 impact survey in April 2020. 62% thought that people would be back in offices in July-August with at least 11% saying longer than that. Most saw travel returning to 50% of prepandemic not until late 2020 and GSOC staff only had 17% in offices

As seen in the infographic above, COVID-19 has completely upended typical operations for security.

Some more takeaways from the survey:

Return to work planning: Nearly all respondents say they have yet to make – or are in the process of developing –return to work plans due to continued high uncertainty. Plans will vary country-by-country, state-by-state and whether staff is deemed essential.

When will 50% return to work? We know this is just a guesstimate, but the July-August timeframe came away the winner with 62% of respondents predicting half of their global staff will be back to work by then. It’s followed by May-June (20%) and September-October (11%).

When will 50% resume traveling? September-October was the most popular estimate at 44% followed by July-August (32%), early 2021 (7%) and mid 2021 (4%). Most respondents believe the bar for business travel has moved higher for the foreseeable future.

We asked what the biggest challenge our members faced was. There were five major categories of response:

Maintaining visibility into the flood of new information
Coordinating communication between different groups
Analyzing and acting on data that varied widely by location
Keeping people healthy, motivated, and engaged
“the unknown unknowns”, as one respondent put it

When asked about how executives were receiving COVID-19 news, security came in second. 21% of respondents said the C-suite was primarily receiving information from security. 45% said crisis management/communications teams were primarily responsible.

However, several respondents mentioned the creation of cross-functional teams focused on responding to the spread of coronavirus.

COVID-19 has completely changed operations for the working world. Security is no exception. We’ll continue to help our community as their responsibilities and realities change.

Partial results of the survey can be seen here. Factal members were sent the full results earlier this month. To try Factal free for 30 days, r equest a free trial.