The hybrid and remote work era has shifted far beyond mere location changes. For accounting professionals, the boundary between personal and professional technology use is increasingly porous. Devices are now shared spaces, creating multi-modal user access, where a laptop or mobile is used for client tax returns and bank portal access during business hours and personal activities after-hours. These boundaries blur when there’s no clear demarcation for staff usage in flexible working arrangements. 

Scenarios like these aren’t just security risks; they’re threats to the client relationships built on professional trust as data custodians. Clients place data in your hands with an implicit trust: that you’ve engineered protections worthy of that privilege. When that is compromised through a data breach, privacy incident or significant loss event, client relationships fracture in ways that regulatory compliance alone cannot repair.   

While personalising devices enhances user satisfaction and productivity, it significantly complicates IT management and security oversight. Traditional endpoint security approaches rely on predictable, enterprise-controlled environments, but these are no longer the norm. The blending of work and personal applications, combined with varied network connections and software, opens new vectors for malware, data leakage, and inadvertent compliance breaches that can compromise client confidentiality and data integrity, which are core to the accounting profession. 

In parallel, decentralised access means sensitive client data, from tax file numbers to financial statements, and client bank details, are no longer confined within firm-managed perimeters. The proliferation of cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and third-party services scatters this privileged information across diverse endpoints and environments. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies intensify this challenge, introducing unmanaged devices into the security landscape, often devoid of standardised cyber security measures. 

This expansion of access points and device types makes endpoints a vulnerable layer in the accounting firm’s cyber security architecture, exposing firms to ransomware, sophisticated phishing and social engineering attacks designed to exploit these very weaknesses.  

The Slow Dissolve: Why the Access Perimeter Is Now a Mesh 

The latest Roy Morgan research shows more than 6.7 million Australians in work-from-home (WFH) arrangements. While rates vary across industries and sectors, finance and professional services employees show the highest WFH adoption rates.  

WFH was previously considered a niche privilege mostly afforded to senior or tech professionals within accounting and related sectors. But four years after the COVID-19 pandemic, remote and hybrid working patterns are no longer a “temporary” practise; they’re the default operating model for most of Australia’s professional class. 

Recent media coverage in Australia underscores the growing cultural demand for remote work. A 2025 article from Yahoo Finance reports that the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) has proposed a work-from-home arrangement that could affect up to 1.8 million Australians. This follows the Fair Work Commission’s 2024 review of the Clerks Award, which examined whether the right to work from home should be formally recognised — a decision that could set a national precedent for clerical roles in the private sector and also scopes out bookkeeping roles. The outcome of this case is expected to serve as a test case for WFH rights across Australia. 

In a global survey by The Adecco Group, 85% of Australians believe work flexibility is beneficial, and 74% of employees in Australia and New Zealand view hybrid work as the ideal model. Moreover, from an employer perspective, the Australian HR Institute’s (AHRI) 2025 Hybrid and Flexible Working Report shows that hybrid work adoption has remained strong and continues to represent one of the most significant workplace trends in Australia.

Employers consistently identify better work–life balance as a key benefit of this arrangement, and findings from the same AHRI research indicate that most organisations expect to continue supporting hybrid working models over the next two years.

Accounting firms adopted cloud-first tools earlier and faster than most industries, but there is a trade-off. Cloud software unlocked speed, collaboration, and client responsiveness, but it also dismantled the tidy, office-based trust model that used to make security engineering straightforward. What remains is no longer a perimeter you can defend with a single wall. It’s a mesh of devices, identities, and apps that must be continuously verified. This is the ground truth every practice leader must accept before they can meaningfully act. 

What’s Changed in the Remote Work Landscape 

This mesh didn’t appear overnight. Understanding why it’s permanent, despite executive pressure to reverse it, requires examining the trajectory that brought 36% of Australia’s workforce outside traditional security perimeters. 

Remote-work prevalence was small in the 2016 ABS Census, with only ~5% of Australians regularly working from home. That 5% became the pre-pandemic baseline for workforce planning, according to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of remote work rose dramatically and it never returned to those 2016 levels. Instead, hybrid work embedded itself across knowledge sectors.  

The Australian HR Institute’s 2025 Report on Hybrid and Flexible Working Practices in Australian Workplaces reinforces this shift: 70% of organisations plan to maintain their current hybrid-working arrangements over the next two years, up from 59% in 2023 and 53% in 2022. This upward trend confirms that both remote and hybrid work patterns are stabilising, and set to persist well into the next planning cycle. 

Mcrindle’s data also cited that 45% of Australians are engaged in hybrid work including 62% of remote workers, most of whom are based in Australia’s central business districts.  

Multiple surveys from 2024-25 CEDA, ABS, and Roy Morgan confirm what the data already shows: hybrid remote work has become a structural fixture in Australia, holding steady even as many senior executives expect a stronger office return within a few years according to KPMG 2024 CEO Outlook Report.  

The 2025 Reality: Persistence Meets Political Friction

In 2025, remote and hybrid work are baked into workforce choices. Many professionals accept lower nominal pay for flexibility and expect persistent hybrid arrangements. Yet return-to-office (RTO) mandates are surging, even as flexible work shifts from discretionary privilege to embedded employment feature. 

Media reports indicate many senior leaders publicly signal a push to “return” to offices, with previous data from KPMG’s CEO Outlook Report in 2024, showing a notable share of CEOs to expect more on-site work. Meanwhile, employees and professionals continue to prefer hybrid flexibility and will vote with attrition if forced back. This creates tension: employee expectations and labour market realities continue to favour flexibility, while leadership and some corporate policies push for increased office attendance. 

This planning paralysis creates inconsistent security controls across distributed teams and hybrid workforces. Accounting practices will continue to have dispersed users, devices, and client data outside traditional network boundaries. This permanent arrangement has practical cybersecurity implications: more personal devices, more home-network endpoints, and more shadow IT. 

Device Personalisation: Why “One Device, Many Lives” Is a Problem 

Employees now carry their work, and their lives, on the same small, powerful computers. Laptops, tablets, and phones are used for payroll one moment and family banking the next. Work-issued devices support household streaming in the evening. That blurring of purpose is convenient, but it dramatically increases risk because consumer apps, extensions, and personal configurations live side-by-side with client data and tax portals. 

This dual use is now the norm in knowledge work. ABS data shows managers and professionals, including accountants, are the most likely to work remotely regularly. Remote work, in turn, correlates strongly with multi-context device use: the same laptop serving both client tax preparation and evening Netflix. 

Accounting workflows route high-value PII (tax file numbers, bank details, financial statements) through devices that are rarely inspected, patched, or segmented. A browser extension, a misconfigured personal cloud sync, or a family-member’s app can create a silent exfiltration path.

The defense isn’t moralising BYOD, but engineering for it: measured control through MDM (mobile device management) and EDR (endpoint detection and response), conditional access, and clear policies that assume devices are shared rather than pristine. 

Decentralised Access: Why Sessions Everywhere, Control Nowhere 

Where access once emanated from a handful of office IP addresses, it now initiates from home Wi-Fi, cafés, airport lounges, and literally two devices in the same person’s pocket. The result is simple: data and sessions have decentralised. The identity is the common denominator. The network is not. 

This decentralisation shows up in two visible tensions. First, the return-to-office tension creates access policy paralysis. Leaders declare RTO ambitions while simultaneously recruiting remote staff and accommodating flexible arrangements. The result? Inconsistent access controls and security expectations across the same firm. Some users connect from office networks with full visibility, others from home networks with minimal oversight, yet both access the same client data systems. 

Second, decentralisation multiplies integration points: practice management portals, cloud accounting (Xero/MYOB), banking portals, shared drives, and third-party add-ons. Each requires its own authentication token (a digital access credential) and access scheme, collectively extending your attack surface. Firms that treat decentralised access as a temporary risk will keep playing catch-up. Instead, decentralisation must be the starting assumption for architecture and policy design. 

Endpoint Exposure: Why a Weak Link Is the Path of Least Resistance 

Endpoints have become the vectors attackers prefer because they carry human decisions and humans make predictable mistakes. The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s previous annual assessment in 2023–24 highlights that business email compromise (BEC), credential theft, and social engineering remain dominant cybersecurity incident types. Moreover, available data taken from FY2023–24, revealed that those threats accounted for a large share of self-reported cybersecurity incidents against Australian organisations. 

Conversely, the last published Digital Defense Report of Microsoft for 2024 showed that password-based attacks dominate identity threats, exploiting predictable human behaviours like weak passwords and reuse. The same report identifies identity protection as the top cybersecurity priority for organisations. 

With cybersecurity threats growing in sophistication and frequency, even a single phishing or token-theft event can turn a personal device into a firm-wide emergency. For firms, endpoint exposure is not theoretical. Reported losses from BEC and targeted scams in Australia run into the tens of millions. Small and medium practices often face the steepest consequences because they lack dedicated incident response teams and forensic budgets. 

The tactical response requires continuous endpoint posture verification from EDR to MDM and managed patching, all combined with identity controls. These controls must revoke access the moment behaviour deviates from expected patterns whether that’s unusual login locations, unexpected data access, or compromised credentials. 

Zero Trust and Multi-level Security: The New Logic, Not Just a Buzzword 

Zero Trust is now operational guidance, not a marketing slogan. Analysts and government guidance converge on a single point: trust must be explicit, conditional, and ephemeral. Gartner and the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) describe the move from implicit “inside” trust to identity-and-context verification for every session. 

But adoption is nuanced. Firms often check boxes (MFA enabled, antivirus installed) and call themselves “secure.” The practical difference between piecemeal controls and a unified Zero Trust posture is integration: identity systems (SSO/IAM), conditional access, device posture telemetry, and centralised logging must operate as a coherent control plane. Without that, MFA is just another installed control that can be bypassed by evolving adversary techniques such as AiTM (Adversary-in-the-Middle) attacks and token theft. As Microsoft’s Digital Defense Report 2024 confirms, defensive success requires continuous, layered verification. 

From Framework to Practice: Building Unified Security

Today’s security ecosystem extends far beyond traditional perimeters. Cloud applications, endpoints, emails, and identity management must function as a coordinated whole, not isolated controls. For accounting firms managing TPB obligations alongside distributed teams, this means translating Zero Trust principles into operational reality.

Most practice leaders understand that continuous validation matters. The challenge isn’t conceptual. It manifests in integration: making identity systems, endpoint tools, access controls, and compliance documentation operate as a coherent control plane rather than a collection of disconnected products.

Modern security platforms address this by consolidating core functions within unified frameworks. Instead of juggling separate tools for MFA, SSO, endpoint monitoring, and offboarding, integrated solutions enable firms to manage these controls from a single pane of glass. When an employee leaves, access revocation happens instantly across all systems not as a multi-day IT project prone to gaps. When device posture changes, access policies adjust automatically based on risk signals, not manual reviews.

Importantly, these platforms are purpose-built for accounting workflows. Generic enterprise security tools often create friction: forcing tax practitioners through authentication loops that interrupt client calls or applying blanket policies that don’t distinguish between accessing Xero during tax season and browsing the web.

Purpose-built solutions recognise that accountants need security that enables productivity, not obstructs it. MFA doesn’t just add verification layers. It is designed around the rhythm of accounting work, securing high-risk actions like client data access and bank portals while streamlining routine tasks.

AI-driven analytics layer on top, detecting anomalous behaviours that human monitoring misses: a login from an unexpected location during non-business hours, unusual data access patterns, or credential use that deviates from established norms.

But technology alone isn’t sufficient.

These advances must align with Australian regulatory standards—maintaining audit trails that satisfy TPB obligations, generating compliance reports that demonstrate ATO confidentiality alignment, and providing documentation that survives regulatory scrutiny.

Unified platforms reduce complexity precisely when complexity is the enemy. They translate security frameworks into operational controls that accounting professionals can actually manage without dedicated security teams.

For firms navigating device personalisation, decentralised access, and permanent distributed work, the path forward isn’t more tools but better integration of the controls that Zero Trust demands, wrapped in compliance documentation that TPB requires, and delivered through interfaces that accountants can confidently operate.

Conclusion 

The remote work transformation that began as a location change has become an architectural challenge. Endpoints now occupy a contested space, simultaneously personal and professional devices, subject to household use patterns and compliance obligations, managed through policies designed for an office perimeter that no longer exists. 

For Australian accounting firms, the ‘Zero Trust’ framework offers a coherent response: identity-based verification, continuous validation, integrated controls. But frameworks remain abstract until translated into operational practice. Meeting TPB obligations requires more than deploying MFA. It demands audit trails, compliance documentation, and controls that work together rather than in isolation. The practical difference between checkbox security and genuine protection is integration. What emerges from this analysis isn’t uncertainty but clarity about where security architecture must evolve.

The boundary that once protected firm networks has dissolved, but professional obligations haven’t.

Client trust still depends on demonstrating that sensitive financial data is protected, regardless of where or how your team accesses it. That demonstration now requires identity-centric architecture, device posture verification, and compliance evidence that survives regulatory scrutiny. 

The technology exists. The regulatory expectations are clear. The workforce model is permanent. What remains is implementation not as technical projects, but as strategic capability that defines how modern accounting practices protect the client relationships they’ve built.