In a recent survey, it was found that a notable 19% of employees reported a negative impact on their productivity due to app usage. Notifications can become overwhelming in high volumes, which makes it possible for your employees to miss important security alerts. Of course, this presents a risk to your cybersecurity strategy.
What can you do to combat the effects of app fatigue on your security strategy?
Continue reading as we explore the concept of app fatigue, how it can present a security risk, and effective strategies to mitigate its effects.
What Is App Fatigue?
When you have an excessive number of mobile applications, browser apps, or cloud-based software tools, you often receive push notifications that alert you to any new activity. However, when these notifications become high-volume, we tend to disregard or ignore them.
App fatigue refers to ignoring notifications when they are too frequent. It can significantly affect job satisfaction, stress, productivity, and security. Managing app fatigue should be a consideration for any company adopting software applications.
What Are The Consequences Of App Fatigue For Security?
There are many different ways app fatigue can affect your security strategy. Here are some of the consequences app fatigue can bring about.
Decreased Attention To Detail
When overloaded with notifications, your cybersecurity team will pay less attention to each alert. This means that security warnings and essential notifications could go unnoticed, resulting in a security breach.
Reusing Passwords
When your employees have too many apps to log into daily, they might reuse the same passwords across their various apps. If an account were to become breached, this would mean that a cyberhacker would have access to not just one of your apps but several – meaning that more of your sensitive data would become exposed.
Switching Off Notifications
When there is a large volume of notifications, your employees may disable notifications for their apps to increase focus. If their notifications are switched off, they could miss important updates, security alerts, and messages essential to your security strategy.
How To Address App Fatigue
You can implement several strategies to address the effects of app fatigue on your business. Here are the different options to ensure cybersecurity health while adopting essential apps for your business.
Streamline Your Applications
The best way to prevent and address app fatigue is to ensure your business only adopts essential apps. Conduct a thorough audit of the applications currently in use and evaluate whether any of them can be eliminated. Streamlining your app usage can significantly reduce the burden of excessive notifications.
Ask Your IT Team To Manage Notifications
If all the apps in your organisation are essential, there is another way you can address app fatigue. Your IT team can assist in restructuring the notifications system, removing anything unnecessary, and ensuring that only critical security alerts and direct messages are delivered to your employees. By refining the notification settings and being more selective in the types of alerts received, your employees can effectively manage multiple applications without being overwhelmed.
Automate App Updates
Your employees will be notified when it’s time to update their applications. However, if they are suffering from app fatigue, they could ignore these notifications. Failing to keep software up-to-date could result in gaps in cybersecurity protection. By automating these updates, you can mitigate app fatigue while closing any potential gaps in your protection caused by outdated software.
Summary
When considering how to improve your approach to app adoption, it’s essential to factor in the potential for app fatigue. App fatigue impacts cybersecurity and productivity, causing your employees to ignore their notifications. Streamlining your applications, managing notifications, and automating updates can reduce the risk of app fatigue, potentially resulting in cybersecurity issues.
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