Protecting Organizational Information Security at Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Vietnam: Exploratory Findings from Technology-Organization-Environment Framework

While prior research has examined the cognitive factors that influenced the information security behaviors of remote workers, little was known about the impact of the different work environments on these behaviors. Moreover, organizations and employees were abruptly forced to embrace working from home due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which created unprecedented problems and inconvenience in how employees perform daily work at home that could jeopardize organizational information security. This study adapts the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework to investigate the factors that influence how employees in Vietnam protect organizational information security while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our qualitative findings drawn from in-depth interviews with 20 respondents reveal several factors that influence the employee protection of organizational InfoSec at home, such as the use of secure software for remote work, the flexible yet distracting work environment at home, and the lack of social interactions with colleagues that could demotivate personal information security efforts. We offer practical recommendations for organizations to prepare for flexible and secure workplaces in the future, especially to meet the continuing demand for working from home after the COVID-19 pandemic. In terms of theoretical implications, future studies are encouraged to focus on exploring the contextual and situational factors that influence employee information security behaviors.