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The COVID-19 pandemic caused an abrupt and dramatic shift to remote work that has lasted five months so far and is expected to continue into 2021 as companies like Google have extended their work from home policies through July 2021. In this blog, we examine how geography and industry effect who works remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is the first in a series of three blog posts that explore the effects of COVID-19, detailing how it has changed remote work, user behavior, and attacker behavior.
Remote work
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sudden shift to remote work in March 2020. Figure 1 shows the daily dispersion of users on the Netskope platform over the past year. User dispersion is the number of source IP addresses divided by the number of users. If the users are all on the same network, this number approaches 0%, and if all users are on different networks, this number approaches 100%. We use this number as a proxy for the percentage of users that are working remotely. The labeled spikes in the figure correspond to major holidays, on which fewer users tend to be active and those users that are active tend to work remotely.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused the number of people working remotely to increase by 148%. Prior to the pandemic, 26% of users worked remotely on an average weekday. During the pandemic, this increased to 64%. The percentage of remote workers has remained steady over the past five months, indicating that users covered by the Netskope Security Cloud platform—primarily knowledge workers—have not been affected by the recent easing of restrictions. This trend indicates that knowledge workers are likely to continue working remotely in the coming months, and based on guidance from companies like Google, midway through 2021.
Industry breakdown
The increase in remote work caused by the COVID-19 pandemic varies by industry sector. The Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) defines 11 industry sectors. Figure 2 shows the median daily user dispersion before and after the pandemic declaration in each of the sectors. With the exception of “Information Technology” and “Real Estate” (the two sectors with the highest pre-COVID remote work percentages), the number of users working remotely in every sector more than doubled.
“Energy” and “Health Care” trailed other sectors previously and continue to trail the other sectors during the pandemic. For many working in these sectors, their jobs have been classified as “essential.” Many in those sectors also work with specialized equipment that requires them to work from the office. As a result, we see fewer than half of all users working remotely in those sectors. At the other end, “Real Estate” users require no such specialty equipment, have not been classified as “essential,” and therefore see the highest remote work percentage.