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The notion of hybrid workforces and “working from anywhere” has now become engrained in many employees’ normal corporate lives. Unfortunately, this has presented new challenges for securing this new hybrid work model whilst ensuring employees have the same, adequate, user experience they would have if they were in a traditional corporate office setting.
With organisations now requiring protection not only for users, but also devices, apps, and data everywhere and at all times, here are some considerations to ensure you are correctly securing your hybrid workforce:
With a myriad of benefits from cloud computing, there also comes some challenges with such a huge volume of sensitive data being stored in the cloud environment. Naturally, cybercriminals have followed organisations to the cloud as this is where they are able to create significant damage. A hybrid workforce only compounds this issue as the amount of access points increases from the number of devices and networks being used. As the frequency and sophistication of cyber threats rise, the idea of “implicit trust” becomes obsolete. Zero Trust represents a shift in the security mindset of “trusted” internal network and “untrusted” external network, to instead treating all users with the same level of scrutiny. Zero Trust builds on the concepts of context-aware least privileged access and continuous assessment.
Long gone are the days of a security perimeter as hybrid work has expanded this concept beyond the traditional on-premises. You should make some considerations for all traffic from the web, cloud, applications, and devices. Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and all other facets of a Security Service Edge (SSE) architecture address and redefine risk management and data storage/protection across all these vectors.
Contextual awareness is critical in a remote working world. Users can now interact with applications and data in a multitude of ways which means that your security will need to be more circumstantial when making access and policy decisions. Your security must constantly gather rich signals about the user’s context (e.g. who are they?), application (e.g. which app are they trying to access?), device, location & network, and applying access policies based on that information. Furthermore, you security must also detect changes in risk profiles, monitor traffic after access is granted, and mitigate dangerous actions.
All of the above are critical considerations that should be taken into account when selecting the right security solution to safeguard your cloud environment. The tricky part, or more so, what a lot of people tend to forget about is, selecting a security solution that also creates the least amount of impact on your hybrid workers' user experience. You should take into consideration solutions that don’t institute high latency penalties or impose cumbersome detours on traffic. What’s more, security controls should not dominate system resources or require excessive “extra clicks”. Remember, security doesn’t have to reduce business productivity and network performance.
Having vendors with merged capabilities can assist in simplifying management and administration, guarantee undeviating policy enforcement, streamline traffic processing, and lower costs.
Infotrust have specialist skills in cloud security and are placed to deliver a solution that secures all apps, across all locations, across any device. To find out more about how Infotrust can secure your hybrid workforce, contact us today.
You can also try out our FREE Self-Assessment tool to evaluate your cloud security architecture and identify which areas could use some improvement here.
