For about a year now, companies worldwide have been working remotely. Organizational responses have evolved from triage and firefighting to a more strategic view of how remote work is performed.
To be sure, there have been challenges. In order to satisfy the new criteria, VPN deployments that may have previously been undersized had to scale up in short order. Companies had to deal with how they were going to handle the evaluation of the security status of devices connected to their networks. Wherever possible, there was a need to keep the lights on and keep business rolling.
Organizations have now been able to settle in with a better understanding of how to cope with the demands of remote jobs. This past year has endowed security practices with the opportunity to make improvements to help democratize protection for all employees.
Remote Staff And Zero Trust
It’s all about reducing the risk of our organizations as we look at the environment through a zero trust lens, reducing protection costs through automated processes and tools. It involves seeing beyond. The ultimate objective is to make it as easy as possible for remote workers to be able to safely and efficiently get their jobs done without having to worry about security tools.
In what they are good at doing, people are really good. For example, human resources workers or finance people will not necessarily have a firm understanding of cybersecurity, nor should they be required to do so. While ensuring a high degree of security, those running security systems need to make life simpler. It is also an essential plus to provide workers with security resources that enable them to be able to self-manage.
For example, if a remote employee wants to connect to a corporate network and their browser is out-of-date, it will be helpful to allow them the opportunity to patch the browser themselves without the need to engage the helpdesk that has to deal with a great deal already.
Remote Staff And Compliance
Another reason to look at enhancing the resources you use to protect the remote staff is compliance requirements. The auditors would always need to do their job, even in a pandemic. We have a fiduciary duty to safeguard our companies and to be able to show that this mission is being accomplished. To monitor access to sensitive information in your company, you can use multi-factor authentication (MFA). The audit trail from a method like this goes a long way in showing compliance to the audit team.
Trusted Devices And Endpoint Security
For any organization, device trust is important. For our remote teams, this is brought into sharp focus, and the possibility of this going on for months to come. It must be ensured that the devices that connect to the enterprise assets are patched to the latest version. Getting the devices visible, knowing their posture, and controlling the risks associated with them can help minimize exposures to vulnerability. This breaks the deprecated notion of perimeter-based security as the number of cloud-based services grows. The perimeter is wherever an access decision is taken.
Planned efforts directed at minimizing the risks associated with remote work, keeping in mind the above-described aspects, will ensure a better security posture for organizations.
