Remote work is not a temporary arrangement that professional services firms are still adjusting to. It has been five years. It is the baseline. Most firms’ security posture still treats it like a guest bedroom situation rather than a permanent part of how the business operates.
This is not about blame. The shift happened fast, priorities were elsewhere, and the security implications were not obvious until they became obvious. But by 2025, roughly 42% of employees were logging in remotely at least once a week, which means the attack surface of the average professional services firm now extends well past the office walls into home networks, personal devices, and coffee shops, whether the firm has planned for that or not.
This is what actually matters for your remote work technology setup, without the sales pitch.
The Home Network Problem Your Remote Work Technology Setup Cannot Ignore
Your office network is managed. It has a firewall, monitored access points, and someone responsible for keeping it current. Your employee’s home network has a router their ISP shipped three years ago, still running the default admin password, on firmware that has not been updated since installation.
That is not the employee’s fault. They are not network engineers. However, it is a meaningful gap, and home networks are now the entry point for roughly 38% of cyberattacks targeting remote access infrastructure.
What you can actually do about this: require that any employee working remotely connect through a company-provided VPN before accessing firm systems. A VPN encrypts the connection between the employee’s device and your network, which does not solve the home router problem but substantially reduces what a compromised home network can do to your firm’s data. This is a policy decision more than a technical one, and it is not expensive to implement.
Hybrid Work Infrastructure Planning Starts with Devices
Misconfigured access controls accounted for 24% of cloud security breaches in 2025, and a significant percentage of those trace back to personal devices accessing company systems without proper configuration.
When an employee uses a personal laptop to access your client portal, document management system, or email, that device may be running outdated software, missing security patches, or shared with other household members. The firm has no visibility into any of that.
Solid hybrid work infrastructure planning means making a deliberate choice here. Either provide company-owned devices to employees who work remotely and manage those devices centrally, or establish a clear policy for personal device use that includes minimum requirements: current operating system, enabled encryption, and a business-grade password manager. Neither is free, but both are considerably less expensive than responding to a breach.
The People Problem No Technology Solves on Its Own
This one gets less attention than devices and networks, but remote workers are three times more likely to accidentally expose data than office employees, largely because the cues and norms of an office environment are not there to slow them down.
An employee who would never print a client document and leave it at a coffee shop might share that same document through a personal email account because it was faster than logging into the firm portal. Someone who would follow office protocols automatically when surrounded by colleagues may not think twice about the same action from their kitchen.
This is an environment issue, not a character issue. The office creates passive guardrails. Remote work removes them.
What helps: clear, specific policies about how client data can be transmitted and stored outside the office, combined with regular reinforcement. Not an annual training click-through, but actual conversations with staff about specific scenarios, including the borderline ones.
The Three Remote IT Support Priorities for Professional Services Firms
If your firm is going to prioritize, these are the controls that carry the most weight.
Multi-factor authentication on everything. Not just email. Your document management system, client portal, practice management software, and accounting platforms. If an attacker gets a password, MFA is often the only thing standing between them and your client data. In 2025, 91% of companies made MFA mandatory for all remote access points. If your firm has not, that is the first thing to fix.
A written remote work security policy. It does not have to be long. It needs to exist, be specific, and be communicated to staff. It should cover which devices are permitted, how client data can and cannot be transmitted, what to do if a device is lost or compromised, and who to call. If the policy lives only in someone’s head, it is not a policy.
Endpoint management. This means having the ability to see and manage the devices that connect to your firm’s systems, including remotely wiping a device if it is lost or stolen. For firms handling sensitive client financial data, this is a baseline requirement, not a luxury. Your remote IT support provider should be able to tell you exactly what devices are connected to your environment at any given time.
What You Are Not Doing Wrong
The firms I work with that have unresolved remote work security gaps are not being careless. They built remote access solutions quickly, under pressure, and the security refinements got deferred. That is a rational response to a chaotic period.
The window for treating remote security as a work-in-progress is closing, though. Cyber insurance underwriters are increasingly scrutinizing remote work controls specifically, and firms that cannot demonstrate basic hygiene in this area are finding their coverage options narrow. Getting ahead of that is worth the effort.
If you want to walk through where your firm’s remote work technology setup actually stands right now, that is a conversation we are happy to have.
Quick and Easy: Remote work permanently expanded the attack surface of professional services firms, and most firm security policies have not kept pace. The three controls that matter most are MFA on every system, a written and communicated remote work policy, and endpoint management for devices that access firm data. These are not complicated or expensive to implement, but they require treating remote security as permanent infrastructure rather than a temporary workaround.
