What is Work From Home (WFH)?

Work from home describes arrangements where employees perform their job duties from a residential setting rather than a company office.

The shift became widespread during the COVID-19 pandemic, though remote work existed in limited forms for decades prior. From a cybersecurity perspective, WFH introduces fundamental challenges to traditional perimeter-based security models.

When employees work outside the office, they connect from residential networks that lack enterprise-grade protections. They may use personal devices that don't meet corporate security standards or share workspace with family members who could inadvertently access sensitive information. The physical security controls present in office environments—badge access, security cameras, controlled entry points—disappear entirely.

IT teams lose visibility into endpoint behavior, making it harder to detect compromised devices or suspicious activity. Home routers rarely receive security updates, and employees often connect to the same network as IoT devices with known vulnerabilities. Authentication becomes more critical when you can't verify someone's physical location, and data loss prevention gets complicated when corporate files live on home computers. These aren't hypothetical concerns—they represent real attack surfaces that adversaries actively exploit.

Remote work existed long before it had a trendy acronym. In the 1970s, Jack Nilles coined the term "telecommuting" to describe working from home via telephone and early computer connections. Through the 1980s and 1990s, a small percentage of knowledge workers—usually salespeople, consultants, or executives—worked remotely on an ad hoc basis. The practice remained niche partly because technology limited what you could accomplish from home and partly because corporate culture valued physical presence as a proxy for productivity.

The internet's maturation in the 2000s made remote work more feasible, and companies began experimenting with permanent remote positions. Video conferencing, cloud storage, and collaboration platforms removed many technical barriers. Still, most organizations maintained office-centric models.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden, massive shift. Companies that had resisted remote work for years implemented it in days. What had been a gradual trend became an overnight transformation. Millions of employees set up makeshift home offices, often using whatever equipment they had available. Security teams scrambled to extend protections to thousands of remote endpoints simultaneously, frequently compromising security for speed. The pandemic proved that remote work could function at scale, but it also exposed how unprepared most organizations were for the security implications.

Work from home has permanently altered the threat landscape. Attackers know that home networks offer softer targets than corporate perimeters, so they've adapted their tactics accordingly. Phishing campaigns increased dramatically as employees worked from home, partly because people are more distracted in residential settings and partly because the usual behavioral cues that something's wrong—like asking a colleague about a suspicious email—become harder.

The mix of personal and professional device usage creates confusion about what's protected and what isn't. An employee might check work email on a phone their teenager uses for games, or store corporate files on a personal laptop that never receives security patches. VPNs that were designed to handle a few dozen traveling executives buckled under the load of entire companies connecting remotely. Many organizations responded by moving applications to the cloud, which solved the capacity problem but introduced new risks around cloud misconfigurations and excessive permissions.

The lack of physical security matters more than many realize. In an office, you probably wouldn't leave your screen unlocked when you step away. At home, with kids or roommates around, that discipline often slips. The boundary between work and home has blurred in ways that create both productivity and security challenges that organizations are still figuring out.

Plurilock helps organizations secure distributed workforces without compromising usability. Our zero trust architecture services redesign access controls around identity verification rather than network location, which matters when employees connect from anywhere.

We implement data loss prevention that works across home networks, deploy endpoint detection that provides visibility regardless of device location, and establish identity and access management systems that authenticate users continuously rather than once at login.

Our approach recognizes that securing remote work isn't about recreating office perimeters—it's about building security that travels with users and data wherever they go.