More and more companies are adopting the remote work as the main work model. Find out how to ensure that corporate data and systems are protected in this modality.
Due to the social distancing imposed by the pandemic, companies had to adapt to remote work to ensure the continuity of their business. In this way, several employees started working from home, accessing data and corporate networks through home networks.
However, with so many remote employees, ensuring the protection of the entire environment has become a great challenge. As a result, the cybersecurity of corporate systems has become one of the main concerns of companies at this time.
Due to this situation, companies needed to prepare themselves to offer the necessary resources and technologies so that workers continue to work in the best possible way. Besides providing to the team the devices and access necessary, companies need to ensure the security of their information.
Do you know how to do this? To provide cybersecurity for the entire corporate infrastructure in remote access, it is key to take some precautions. Learn more about the subject.
Information Security and Remote Work Challenges
Most companies had their routine completely transformed, besides suffering from several negative impacts on business due to the current context. This happened because it was necessary to migrate to the remote work model to continue the activities and, at the same time, comply with social distancing rules.
This change of scenery has required organizations to adapt and begin to implement modern cybersecurity tools to prevent attacks by cybercriminals who are increasingly smart and successful. It became necessary to ensure that all employees could work from home with data security and privacy.
However, this has been a great challenge, because, to work from home, the employees of these companies are using several technological solutions, such as shared drives, videoconferencing software, project management tools, among others.
According to Gartner:
”Through 2021, more than half of the companies will convert and extend their ad hoc crisis remote workforce tools and processes to a long-term strategy without updating the relevant security controls. Security and risk management leaders, including CISOs, responsible for infrastructure security, should:
- Derive security profiles from remote work practice impacts on traffic patterns to adjust prevent, detect and respond capabilities.
- Build remote work security architectures by analyzing today’s and tomorrow’s employee types including cross-functional business workflows, technical concerns such as endpoints and network constraints, application architectures, and data concerns such as classification and governance.
- Build inclusive security profiles by:
- Performing security posture assessment for all remote work use cases including when an employee’s role is ill-adapted to remote work, or when compliance requirements demand stringent security controls.
- Reviewing available security technology options for each component of the remote work traffic patterns, from endpoint clients to data security, and revise security analytics options for a mostly off-premises enterprise’s compute and communication.”
(i.e. "Gartner, Designing Security for Remote-Work-First Enterprises, June 30, 2020, Jeremy D'Hoinne, De'Onn Griffin and Rob Smith.”)
Some companies need to scale up ten times - some, one hundred times - the remote access to their infrastructure. The lessons learned from the crisis will be useful to identify gaps. However, fast solutions are not always good for the long term.
Therefore, designing the security for remote work requires revisiting where and how risk and security management leaders, including CISOs, target their efforts. They need to focus on work from home practices, technology restrictions, applications and data to create scalable security software for those employees.
Remote work security can no longer be considered a secondary concern. This is already part of the New Normal and, thus, security teams need to get ready for new cybersecurity models that prioritize remote and Cloud work.
