l like How to Manage Endpoint Security in a Hybrid Remote Work Environment
Remote work in the corporate world is here to stay. After most businesses were forced to ask their employees to work online from home during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work opportunities are now the norm in businesses all over the world.
While your business and employees are generally in hybrid remote work, your IT Departments have had to move at lightning speed to accommodate off-site work. They are even in charge to design ongoing security in this new and evolving work environment. To that end, endpoint security strategies must continue to ramp up to heighten cybersecurity with today’s widely distributed workforce.
To successfully meet these challenges, Deskside partners with clients to assess all points of cybersecurity in their current setups and for future growth scenarios. Here are some of the most common courses of action that we highlight.
Ensure endpoint anti-viruses are doing their job
Endpoint security is the process of protecting devices like desktops, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets from malicious threats and cyberattacks. Endpoint anti-viruses have one job: help detect, avert and eradicate malware on all of these devices. While antivirus software typically protects an individual device, endpoint security solutions protect the entire business network. That includes all the myriad devices connecting to it.
Every endpoint that connects to a business network is a vulnerability, providing a potential entry point for cyberattacks. Thus, every device an employee uses to connect to any business system carries the risk of becoming the chosen route for a hacker’s entry. Malware can exploit your devices which could leak or steal sensitive data from the business as a result. A compromised endpoint can easily evolve into compromised applications and infrastructure (even that on the cloud) full of critical data.
Our focus is to provide you endpoint solutions. We make sure that you can discover, monitor, and assess the risks facing the endpoints, while maintaining all devices to be compliant, mitigate potential risks, and reduce exposure to threats.
Strengthen the Zero Trust approach across your environment
Traditional network security used to abide by the “trust but verify” method, meaning initial verification would then lead to automatically trusted users and endpoints within the organization’s perimeter. Times have changed.
Now that so many more businesses are operating on cloud networking and most of the employees are working remotely, your networks are at much higher risk of legitimate credentials. What once you could easily trust can now be an attack of cyber crime. The now antiquated ‘trust but verify’ approach is far too compassionate in a world where cybersecurity can no longer automatically trust anything inside or outside its network perimeter. Networks must employ the Zero Trust approach.
Zero Trust is a strategic cybersecurity model designed to protect your digital business environments including your public and private clouds, as well as SaaS applications. Zero Trust models mitigate the risk of cyberattacks by demanding that anyone and everything trying to connect to your organization’s systems must first be verified before access is granted – no matter what the history of usage is.
Protect your data with encryption
Encryption is a digital form of cryptography that uses algorithms to scramble messages. Only individuals who possess the sender’s cipher or key are able to decode and unscramble data back to a readable format.
In a hybrid database cloud environment with users and applications distributed far and wide, encryption of in-transit data traffic is one of the common measures to protect against network ‘eavesdropping’.
Heighten staff awareness of threats with suitable training and testing
Even with a strong email security boundary in place, attackers can try to sneak through and operate inside your email network. How do they gain entry? Human error.
Human error is involved in 90%+ of all security breaches. An engaging (but not overwhelming) security awareness training program will help turn your employees into wise and wary first line of defense.
Certainly, many workplace environments will have employees who will groan about going through this type of training, but we can help you adapt training and testing programs that will teach employees necessary practices for vigilance, without overwhelming them with an overly technical approach. With phishing and ransomware attacks on the rise, organizations must tailor reduce the potential of human error in opening the door to a significant cybersecurity threat.
Secure your environment by using a single identity management solution
With remote or hybrid work environments, it’s more important than ever to connect every application your company uses to a centralized identity management solution. The wide adoption of SaaS applications has caused identity management to become a bit of an afterthought; however, when your network is using a single identity management solution, granting and revoking your access can become a significant challenge.
The use of single identity management for a given user across multiple systems greatly eases tasks for both administrators and users by simplifying access monitoring and verification. By setting identity management practices in place prior to significant growth, we help businesses smooth the bumpy roads that team growth, new partnerships, and even business continuity can cause.
The challenges of hybrid work environments continue to evolve, but wise security strategies help businesses stay ahead of threats. Deskside is happy to partner with you in determining the strongest combination of programs, protocols, and processes that will keep your networks safe.
