As remote working is now the norm, organisations are having to consider how best to secure their IT infrastructure. One way is to deploy workloads and critical resources into the cloud in order to support the demand on remote working. Companies must also ensure they’re properly securing data, applications, and other digital resources that are getting migrated. With the threat landscape continuing to evolve in this COVID-19 era, organisations need to establish a security framework and leverage their cloud strategy so that digital innovations don’t result in cyber threats and increased business risks.
Protecting the cloud requires going beyond the traditional security model. With secure access to cloud resources available from anywhere, organisations should have the confidence to deploy any application on any cloud infrastructure with ease. Leveraging the cloud to augment on-premises capacity and to enable new functionalities provides scalable, manageable and secure remote access with minimal IT overhead and no need to deploy additional devices. Using security solutions deployed in the cloud quickly provides increased remote access capacity and application security capabilities to address the following challenges many organisations are now facing:
Challenges of the remote worker
Critical applications and data deployed on-premises – many of which may have only been previously accessible by individuals inside the network – now need to be accessed remotely. Making these resources suddenly available to remote users introduces unexpected risks that may be challenging to address.
More users than ever need remote access to applications and data. As a result, remote connectivity capacity is being overwhelmed. And because addressing these requirements needs to be done rapidly, the provisioning of hardware is not feasible. As a result, access to business and productivity applications may be adversely impacted.
As users interact less in person, the use of SaaS productivity tools and email is especially critical for organisations to continue operating, particularly as they use personal devices to access. Tools for collaboration, productivity and email are employees’ primary forms of communication, resulting in more information being shared over collaboration tools and email. Because of this, it is crucial that content is secured and visibility into SaaS collaboration platforms is maintained. One way to do this is through Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols which establish authenticated and encrypted key links between networked computers, files and software.
Prioritising endpoint security
As organisations turn to the cloud as their answer for remote working demands, endpoint security policies should be a major consideration. The response by too many organisations, however, has been to deploy multiple, siloed security products, the bulk of which are focused on prevention. But the truth is, 100 per cent prevention is not possible. The result is a fragmented, complicated security architecture that can actually make detection and response more difficult. What’s needed is the ability to detect a threat quickly, contain and remediate it, and share that intelligence across the entire distributed network so systems can all get back to normal as fast as possible.
Endpoint security solutions not only include automated detection and response, but the ability to seamlessly integrate into a larger network security framework, meaning faster response times to threats. With a fully integrated solution, enterprises will gain further visibility and tightly coordinated, dynamic control of network, user, and host activity. They’ll be able to extend security seamlessly across their entire distributed network, from their endpoints out to the multi-cloud, their core network, and their branch and other remote-edge locations.
Leveraging the cloud enables organisations to rapidly address new security and connectivity requirements, as the way in which people work changes. A major factor is leveraging endpoint security solutions that enable these organisations to scale and augment the capacity they already have on-premises or in the cloud. This helps keep network and security teams operating in the same model while using a familiar and scalable solution to address growing interaction with customers, partners, vendors, end users and devices.
Steve Mulhearn is Director of Enhanced Technologies UK&I at Fortinet